Experiencing Ethics with Sterne and Musil: A relentless character construction 9783110656947, 9783110655643

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Jorge Estrada Experiencing Ethics with Sterne and Musil

spectrum Literaturwissenschaft/ spectrum Literature

Komparatistische Studien/Comparative Studies Herausgegeben von/Edited by Moritz Baßler, Werner Frick, Monika Schmitz-Emans Wissenschaftlicher Beirat/Editorial Board Sam-Huan Ahn, Peter-André Alt, Aleida Assmann, Francis Claudon, Marcus Deufert, Wolfgang Matzat, Fritz Paul, Terence James Reed, Herta Schmid, Simone Winko, Bernhard Zimmermann, Theodore Ziolkowski

Band 67

Jorge Estrada

Experiencing Ethics with Sterne and Musil

A Relentless Character Construction

Published with generous support of the Ernst-Reuter-Gesellschaft.

ISBN 978-3-11-065564-3 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-065694-7 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-065789-0 ISSN 1860-210X Library of Congress Control Number: 2019951677 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

Acknowledgements In appreciation for the freedom and resources to write this book as a doctorate fellow at the Peter Szondi-Institut für Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft, I thank the Mexican Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología and the Deutscher Akademischer Austausschdienst; the “Thematic Network Principles of Cultural Dynamics”, based at Freie Universität Berlin, for a fellowship that allowed me to enhance my investigation with a research stay during 2017 at the Humanities Center at Johns Hopkins University. For their generosity in commenting and discussing my arguments with me, I am grateful to Maddalena Grazziano, Caio Yurgel, and Lena Abraham. I am specially indebted to Rosa Barotsi for the careful proof-reading of a text rife with lapsus calami and pythian formulations. For their friendship during the undefinable times of my doctoral studies, I wish to express my gratitude to Marcos Andrade Neves, Agnieszka Hudzik, Martin Pawlik, Camila Gonzatto, Luis Emilio Martínez, and Ricardo Álvarez. Ultimately, I thank Prof. Joachim Küpper for his continuous, patient and finespun supervision of this investigation, and Prof. Susanne Zepp for supporting my research and for her insights. The final text also benefited from a lively exchange with Prof. Anne Eusterschulte, Prof. Michael Gamper, and Dr. Tatiana Korneeva.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110656947-202

Contents Acknowledgements  | V Preface: user manual for puzzles missing pieces | 1 1 Rational Irrationality | 5 1.1 Methodological assumptions | 5 Tristram’s narrative program or rational agenda | 13 1.2 1.2.1 Certainties and methods | 22 Prerequisites: ideal and factual ingredients | 30 1.2.2 On justification: either Bedlam or Newgate | 39 1.3 1.3.1 Moosbrugger’s case as justification | 44 Kantian jurists | 50 1.3.1.1 Psychiatrists and rationality examined | 53 1.3.1.2 1.3.1.3 Deliberation and autobiography | 59 Will to be recognized | 62 1.3.1.4 Against the tertium non datur or when simulating, lying, 1.3.1.5 hallucinating | 65 1.3.1.6 Deliberation in univocal and plurivocal worlds | 69 Eigenschaftslosigkeit or how attributes held the world in one 1.3.2 piece | 78 1.3.2.1 New state of affairs or how to rely on ideas in a positivistic world | 84 Self-assertion and rationality in a world of functions | 93 1.3.2.2 1.4 Interim balance: Moosbrugger’s intentions or basic actions | 97 2 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.3.1 2.3.2 2.4

The Multifarious Life of the Mind | 104 Mental persona: from narrative program to compositional principles | 104 Redefinition of life in Tristram Shandy | 107 Protagoras’ protean dilemma: Ulrich reflecting on reflecting fluids | 121 Even before pondering: life as a journey without autonomy | 121 Sentient fluids | 128 A necessary digression: truthful mental life in a biographical account | 134

VIII | Contents

2.4.1 2.4.1.1 2.4.1.2 2.4.1.3 2.4.2 2.4.2.1 2.4.2.2 2.4.3 2.4.3.1 2.4.3.2 2.4.3.3 2.4.4 2.5 2.5.1 2.5.2 2.5.3 2.5.4 3 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4

Truth with autonomy are the parables of fools and idealists in Kakania | 134 Truth and autonomy | 134 The fool, the idealist, and the Möglichkeitsmensch | 141 The fool, the idealist, and Gleichnis | 147 Bivalence principle and truthful lines in Tristram Shandy | 154 Neither true nor false: beyond the bivalence principle | 154 The line of beauty or the truth in a fictional biography | 166 Imaginary lines, perspectives and Ulrich’s vanishing point of becoming | 179 Imaginary straight lines and poetic autonomy | 179 Biographical perspectives and their vanishing points | 188 Becoming oneself without becoming a total abstraction | 196 End of the digressive line: life as a stroll with sense of style | 211 One concern with two structuring procedures | 224 Ulrich’s analytical penchant | 230 Tristram’s retentive Lebenswelt | 244 Digression and essayismus | 252 Ethos, form, and its hermeneutic scope | 262 Character Construction as Relational Difference | 270 Becoming a figure of thought | 270 Glassy, waxy, and colloidal essences | 279 Brittleness: between determinism and predictions | 294 The ineffable origins of a character trait | 310

Bibliography | 326 Index | 334

Preface: user manual for puzzles missing pieces The swift reader I encourage to abscond and find sanctuary in Virginia Woolf’s essay “The New Biography”. She begins by exhausting immediately and with modernist decorum our common interest thusly: “‘The aim of biography’, said Sir Sidney Lee, who had perhaps read and written more lives than any man of his time, ‘is the truthful transmission of personality’, and no single sentence could more neatly split up into two parts the whole problem of biography as it presents itself to us today. On the one hand there is truth; on the other there is personality.”1 But it is on a third phantasmatic hand, on a treacherously concealed or trembling paranoid hand, that lies an epochal agenda determining the aim of biography and binding the two split parts together again. This phantasm reveals itself if one looks closer into Woolf’s passage. With dexterous strokes giving weight to Sidney Lee’s words, she informs us that his scholarship was the hard-earned product of a lifetime immersed in biographical accounts. In other words, she uses biography as a rhetorical device that justifies and legitimizes a claim. Such persuasive force is not only drawn from the narrative but is grounded in assumptions about a character’s identity and its agency. A modest glimpse into the presuppositions that permeate biography’s scope as a rhetorical device and affect truth and personality is what awaits the reader whose curiosity is already moderately piqued and will therefore bear with me for a while. But if, despite your interest, you must still rush through life, I would recommend peeking into my favorite subchapter 2.5. “End of the digressive line: Life as a Stroll”. Now, to the remaining patient readers I will offer a brief description of the circumstances surrounding this investigation before tackling the matter at hand. Above all, this text is about shortcomings. Both narratively depicted constraints on knowledge and my own limitations. Instead of striving for acumen and expertise in a highly specified topic, I adopted the opposite stance and tried to delve into different traditions to blur their boundaries and discover connections between the literary devices and ideas conveyed in The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy and Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften. This method of inquiry adheres to the idea that literary texts are “universally appropriable structures”2 || 1 Virginia Woolf, “The New Biography”, in Collected Essays, vol. 4 (London: Hogarth Press, 1967), 229. 2 I owe this idea to Joachim Küpper’s approach to World Literature. He advocates for “an attitude that considers cultural artifacts, including literary texts, as universally appropriable. It proposes considering the varying reception of different literary works: some as received across https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110656947-001

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and attempts to outline a longue durée discussion by bringing together two texts without neglecting their differences. But despite my boldness, I must confess that trying to bring together such dissimilar novels still seems like very poor matchmaking due to their different sense of humor. Tristram embodies with his innuendos and bawdy jokes a Freudian nightmare that will cause at least one fit of laughter in its gravest readers, whereas Musil’s novel moves in the opposite direction and its slow-paced irony may sometimes lead to an inaudible chuckle. To smooth over their differences I propose to read Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften playfully and to take Sterne’s novel more seriously, or as Tristram would put it: “after the manner of the gentle passion, beginning in jest,—but ending in downright earnest.” (I, xix, 60)3 Indeed, this would never bridge the unsurmountable difference between the novels’ mode of presentation. Irony always flirts with the unfathomable depths that undermine any epistemological claim, whereas humor lingers in the surface by playing with appearances and its effects. However, a shifting and perhaps inappropriate viewpoint allows to speculate on how traditions are connected by diverse texts, motifs, and stylistic devices, and converge in narrative structures that rely on intertextuality to posit the Self as a patchwork of mental phenomena. Given this scattering issue, rather than getting down to the nitty-gritty of highly specialized discussions and contributing to scholarship merely a new note in the same harmony, I traverse diverse keys and embrace the occasional dissonances, which are unavoidable when intertwining sources like analytical practical philosophy, humanism, hermeneutics, and post-structuralism. This heuristic paraphernalia serves to articulate the humorous gravity that took hold of me and to answer the simple question that motivated this research, namely, how does one get acquainted with somebody? The most immediate

|| the world and over long periods of time, others as limited in resonance and even forgotten after a certain number of years, as primarily conditioned by the “needs” (in terms of a world model, of a pragmatic content, of a compensatory dimension) and desires of the readers and communities who invest time and effort in the reception of a specific text or work.” Joachim Küpper, preface to Approaches to World Literature, ed. Küpper (Berlin: Akademie, 2013), 12. In this context, “structures” means contents presented in highly codified ways that “appeal to us”. For this idea of structures as “well made”, see Joachim Küpper, “Some Remarks on World Literature”, in Approaches to World Literature, ed. Küpper (Berlin: Akademie, 2013), 171. 3 Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, ed. Melvyn New and Joan New (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1978), [1760–1769]. Sterne’s novel will be cited in-text with volume, chapter, and page. I also took advantage of the online version offered at gutenberg.org. It reproduces the original typographical nuances which could otherwise become a nuisance to reproduce faithfully.

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manner is a face-to-face encounter, in which one could start a conversation and inquire after the “Whens” and “Whats” of life. One could even rely solely on language and get acquainted with people never seen in real life, because a narration can unfold a personal identity before one’s eyes. But how reliable is such a narration? Is certainty attainable? Could one at least rely on the correlation between actions and their motives, if not on the narrated events themselves? Or should one discard such a question because the available tools are stylistic devices handed down and consequently impossible to control? Can we vouch at least for a story about oneself? Does language, ultimately, acquire legitimacy in its performance? And still, whichever objection might be raised, there is something like being a good – or bad – judge of character, a certain Menschenkenntnis that tells us what to expect from any interaction, a skill that Sir Sidney Lee, according to Woolf, probably acquired by correlating so many truths with so many personalities. Attire, expressions, and actions are items gathered around a name, juxtaposed, systematized, and assembled into a coherent picture. But the pieces from this puzzle are stretched throughout time, so there is always a missing piece, the promise of a cornerstone that would complete the picture. And still, this last piece of certainty might seem superfluous since, by following patterns over time, the missing quadrant might have become predictable. But what if our fantasy leads us astray and the last piece shatters our previous assumption of what would have made that image whole? Despite our efforts to know somebody, there is always the possibility that she or he will act out of character, and this simple thought sheds a flickering light on what we have constructed and posited as somebody’s personality. With this doubt in mind, our previous endeavors reveal themselves to be the heavy-handed handling of pieces that were not supposed to fit, but were forced by the sheer pressure of our presuppositions into awkward positions. After such a discovery one starts suspecting that even the categories employed to define contiguous pieces were false and that the colors were not part of a continuum but layers that overlap and saturate. Color saturation, however, is hard to achieve in narratives which move forwards, sideways, and backwards, but can never stop long enough to build up their intensity and reveal in a single image the quintessence of a hue or the definite meaning of an action. To achieve saturation, they must rely on a reader retaining and contrasting all the actions between a first and last page. To examine this literary ethical space in which one cultivates this Menschenkenntnis is the goal of this investigation. In the first part, I tackle truth in the sense of the observable deeds of a life and rely on analytical practical philosophy to develop the underlying problem of irrationality ingrained in the

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novels’ narrative agenda. The second part traces the novel’s humanist sources to reveal a mind’s truths and how one can truthfully imagine anything. Imagination and fantasy are central to personality and lead to reflections upon “form,” a concept that conciliates rationality with a multifarious mental life. The third and last part serves as a thorough conclusion and builds upon the previous argumentation to explore moral character as a figure of thought in relational ethics.

1 Rational Irrationality 1.1 Methodological assumptions Illustrating the ambiguous relation of Laurence Sterne’s realist-sentimental novel from the Age of Enlightenment The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759/67) and Robert Musil’s twentieth-century modernist novel Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (1930/32) towards rationality represents the first step in this investigation, the main purpose of which is to analyze how both novels undermine a conception of ethics that posits actions as a practical necessity of reason and the will. This controversial position can be easily identified in their narrative structure. Both steer away from constructing their protagonists through actions and instead depict in detail their mental life, exploring in this manner an alternative approach to ethics that focuses on the manifoldness of experience. The main assumption described above is also the one propelling this investigation: narrating implies an ethical stance.1 This study aims to identify how an ethical framework may relate to a narrative structure. Such an endeavor represents far less a theoretical than a methodological attempt to bring together ethics and narration, that is, to show how narrative and practical understanding correlate.2 What I call an ethical stance results from the interaction between various narrative devices. Character construction, emplotment, and descriptions of the diegetic world are some of the stylistic devices at a writer’s disposal. These elements articulate a conceptual network, belong to a language of action, constitute a narrative repertoire, and determine what is feasible and unfeasible.3

|| 1 Nussbaum’s approach to Ethical Criticism inquires after such a stance (Love’s Knowledge (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 50). Her paper on “An Aristotelian Conception of Rationality” conveys the ethical conception that will be derived from both novels and supports the idea that narratives enrich a rational deliberation defined by concrete features that range from the observable to the wide palette of mental phenomena. 2 This concern is in such a way indebted to Paul Ricœur’s Temps et récit (1983) and Soi-même comme un autre (1990), that one could fairly say my argumentation mixes both works and—successfully or not—applies his notion of triple mimesis to ethical matters. Instead of the experience of time, the question here is how a character experiences ethics, how our protagonists experiment with their moral life. For triple mimesis, see Paul Ricœur, Temps et récit, vol. 1, L’intrigue et le récit historique (Paris: Seuil, 1983), 105–162. 3 Ricœur, Temps et récit, 109–113. The conceptual network, which finds its concrete form in the language used to convey actions, is part of the precomprenhension or prefiguration of the world. The prefiguration is the first moment of the emplotment and comprises the conceptual network, https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110656947-002

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However, the actions that actually take place do not define the ethical stance. What might seem like a static set of values instantiated by an action is just a moment of quietude, like a stiffened gesture that will collapse when motion is restored. For this reason, a stance does not refer to the immovable position of a conviction, but rather to the ability to apply our knowledge in any concrete circumstance without repeating something learned by rote: “Positiv ausgedrückt: er [oder sie, J. E.] muß selbst schon durch Ausübung und Erziehung eine Haltung in sich ausgebildet haben, die in den konkreten Situationen seines Lebens festzuhalten und durch das rechte Verhalten zu bewähren sein ständiges Anliegen bleibt.”4 Stance is thus related to the Aristotelian ethos, to regularity of behavior. A stance is not produced by applying a technique without taking into consideration the circumstances surrounding it but must be cultivated with practice.5 In the present investigation, the idea of stance is translated into narrative terms to delve into the novels’ self-reflexivity and the key is the notional affinity between the stance implied by a novel’s poetics and the disposition to act in a certain way. This affinity allows us to approach a narrative’s ethical stance through the interrelationship between the act of giving a narrative account of oneself, and character construction, which establishes a disposition to act in a compositionally coherent way. To identify a disposition is to systematize all the expressions and actions of a person until one becomes so savvy that, for instance, predicting a friend’s || the symbolic resources, and the temporal character that narrating confers to actions. With these resources one configures, by means of the emplotment, an experience of the world and endows it with a meaning that could lead to the refiguration of the reader’s horizon. 4 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode. (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010), 318–319. “Das ist der Punkt, an dem die Analyse des sittlichen Wissens durch Aristoteles mit dem hermeneutischen Problem der modernen Geisteswissenschaften in Beziehung gesetzt werden kann. Gewiß handelt es sich bei dem hermeneutischen Bewußtsein weder um ein technisches noch um ein sittliches Wissen. Aber diese beiden Weisen des Wissens enthalten doch die gleiche Aufgabe der Anwendung in sich, die wir als die zentrale Problemdimension der Hermeneutik erkannt haben. Freilich ist deutlich, daß ‘Anwendung’ hier wie dort nicht das gleiche bedeutet. Zwischen der lehrbaren Techne und dem, was man durch Erfahrung erwirbt, besteht eine höchst eigentümliche Spannung.” (320) 5 “Wie aber ist Interpretieren dann lehrbar bzw. lernbar? Gadamer würde sagen: durch die Entwicklung einer bestimmten Haltung. Diese Haltung wird ebenso wie jede Haltung durch ihr entsprechende Handlungen, also durch die vielfache Wiederholung der Tätigkeit der Textinterpretation, erworben. Es genügt allerdings nicht, diese Aktivität einfach nur wiederholt auszuüben, sondern man muß sie bereits mit einer bestimmten Einstellung bzw. in einer bestimmten Haltung ausüben.” Friederike Rese, “Phronesis als Modell der Hermeneutik. Die hermeneutische Aktualität des Aristoteles (GW 1, 312–329)”, in Hans-Georg Gadamer. Wahrheit und Methode, ed. Günter Figal (Berlin: Akademie, 2007), 146.

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reactions becomes a habit in itself. Regularity in the two novels examined here contrasts with an Aristotelian poetics, in which regularity refers to a consistent character representation that conveys a specific type of person acting within the same parameters during a play.6 Instead, a character’s uniformity in both of our more modern narrative constructions represents a challenge to the reader and an open-ended figure of thought, grounded in an indeterminate and unreachable core, on the elusive definite origin beyond our intertextual prejudices. Both novels encourage the reader to pursue the motives and delve into the ethos, whose “Übersetzung durch ‘Charakter’ nicht nur nahe[ge]legt, sondern auch [ge]rechtfertigt [wird]: gemeint sind insgesamt die ‘charakteristischen’ Eigenschaften eines Menschen, seine besondere Eigenart, deren Kern die ‘ethische’ Haltung ausmacht.”7 Attributes are thus avoided, and the task is to advance a semihypothesis that predicts and retroactively endows a person’s life with sense. Our predictions will be always unprecise though. One can only attain a relative certainty about a disposition, but this constraint can be regarded as a fruitful flexibility. New expressions can always be incorporated in the narrative image built to project somebody’s personality. While the new items could be said to enlarge an individual’s dimensions, the shadow cast by this edifice is the personality, an obscure and indefinite space that encompasses the feasible for the individual. A narration casts a personality as if it were a general proposition about the world’s mechanics and, simultaneously, validates our commitment to this proposition through the concatenation of events.8 We ascribe somebody a moral character, that is, an open-ended set of traits and features, each with different determining weight, that as a whole allow us to speak of potential reactions. All actions can be regarded as an enactment of the general disposition grounded in a personality, and, at the same time, any new expression reinforces or helps us to reassess the behavioral dispositions ascribed to a character. But from a broader structural perspective, the ethical stance results from the transactions between character construction and emplotment and, in its most abstract form, it is the room for action, or more precisely, the practical field. This field, in which all the events of a narrative take place, is a projection of the postulates that establish the possible and impossible in the fictional world, a

|| 6 Roman Dilcher, “Über die Charaktere und die dichterische Begabung (Kap.15–18)”, in Aristoteles. Poetik, ed. Otfried Höffe (Berlin: Akademie, 2009), 160–161. 7 Dilcher, “Über die Charaktere”, 161. 8 According to Ricœur the emplotment establishes generalizations about the feasible, see Temps et récit, 84.

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projection of the virtual space where characters dwell and act.9 Similarly to the concept of disposition, the practical field implies a potentiality and serves as a matrix for narrating, for depicting actions. It conveys a stance, in the sense that its presuppositions are articulated in the different layers of a literary work and these aesthetic elements have ethical consequences for the feasible and impossible in the fictional world.10 To understand a fictional world, one must examine the posited natural and behavioral laws. However, one could hardly have the luck to find these laws or regularities in a concise form, for instance, in short sentences that postulate axiomatically and at the same time explain the mechanics of a fictional world. Instead, they must be inferred through a process that entails systematizing the different textual elements, as well as filling the blank spaces, lacunae or holes in the story by resorting to actual knowledge of the world.11 For this reason, the practical field reaches beyond the protagonist’s path. It engulfs the fictional world as a virtuality and includes all the available courses of action that the protagonist has in sight when at a crossroads, regardless of any decision and its effects on the plot. In short, the ethics pursued here does not refer to concrete judgements about good and evil. Ethical stance implies, rather, a framework for the feasible and conceivable, as well as for the premises of human nature or, more precisely, the assumptions that ground character construction and explain actions and thoughts within the novels. If one concedes that talking about a practical field broadens the scope from one single fictional deed towards agency and its constraints, one could claim that the practical field gives form to a specific perspective. A narrative’s ethical stance depicts a model of experience and provides at the same time a model for experience. As stated by Ricœur, a narration brings about, by the means of emplotment, a refiguration of temporal experience. In this manner, a narrative offers a poetic

|| 9 I propose to approach to ethics through three of Doležel’s postulates: fictional worlds are incomplete, accessed through semiotic channels, and their set is unlimited und maximally varied. I resort to the theory of fictional worlds to stress that my analysis focuses on the possibilities a text conveys. The conceptual network of action shouldn’t be considered as preexistent; it is inseparable from the stylistic devices. Lubomir Doležel, Heterocosmica (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 12–28. 10 Nussbaum quotes Henry James who called this approach to concrete moral features embedded in a novel the “projected morality”. (Love’s Knowledge, 8.) 11 For a detailed discussion of how the reader completes a fictional world, see the receptionrelated approach in Wolfgang Iser, Der Akt des Lesens (München: Fink, 1994); for the borders and extension of a fictional world, see Thomas Pavel, Fictional Worlds (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 73–113.

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solution for temporal aporias, a solution that, independently from referential constraints, endows the world with meaning and redescribes the experience of the world through metaphorical reference. This creative act is not only reserved for the writer though. It can be reactivated by the reader by following the story and applying various competences. The reader recognizes genres, textual devices, traditions, thereby actualizing the text and eventually changing his way of relating to or signifying the world. He or she thus takes the novel as a model that does not necessarily raise normative claims.12 Since the experience of time and the ethical dimension coalesce into the language of actions, it is possible to extrapolate Ricœur’s reflections regarding temporal phenomena and advance the hypothesis that a narration can also problematize and explore the experience of ethics. A story presents how decisions come to be, how movements turn into actions. If storytelling emphasizes and revolves around character construction it can serve as an ethical laboratory. Independently of the question about the moral neutrality of art, stories feed intrinsically on the practical field, for “la poétique ne cesse d’emprunter à l’éthique, lors même qu’elle prône la suspension de tout jugement moral ou son inversion ironique. Le projet même de neutralité présuppose la qualité originairement éthique de l’action à l’amont de la fiction. Cette qualité éthique n’est elle-même qu’un corollaire du caractère majeur de l’action, d’être dès toujours symboliquement médiatisée.”13 Narratives entail practical reasoning since they link actions to agents. By doing so, a narrative must not only reproduce a theoretical framework of agency, but can serve to speculate, in narrative terms, on how the experience of ethics is a phenomenon shaped by traditional stylistic devices. In comparison with a philosophical approach that tackles directly the possibilities and workings of practical reasoning, a narration can give an account of how ethics is lived and how the experience of ethics shapes individual characters and at the same time is shaped by them. From this interaction one can discern a deep structure concretized in a narrative that puts forth an ethical conception and its presuppositions about agency. The following analysis adheres to these premises. It intends to examine the novels as narrative ethical laboratories and delve into the depicted experience of a practical field that focuses on the ever-changing mental life. The entry point to this discussion is the characterization of actions, the analysis of which will reveal an asymmetrical relation between mental and factual, in

|| 12 For metaphorical reference, see Ricœur, Temps et récit, 150; for followability, see 145, 130; for time aporetics, poetic act and poetic solution, see 137, 129. 13 Ricœur, Temps et récit, 117.

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the sense of observable and localizable, life. Both novels indirectly undermine the role of actions to narratively criticize deontological ethics grounded in the causality of will and in the intentions provided by Reason. They assume a skeptical position regarding the way intentions and the physical world of causality converge. This means that if practical reasoning cannot move to act, if it does not have any impact on the physical dimension, it can be considered incomplete, because a decision is a cause that becomes a motive and leads someone to act intentionally.14 In this regard, emplotment can show how characters manipulate events and how, in an ideal scenario, their actions are the result of a decision. And, ultimately, one should bear in mind that good decisions are also feasible ones, so any obstacle that prevents the implementation of a decision is suspicious and could suggest a deficiency in practical reasoning.15

|| 14 Kant’s practical philosophy can serve as an example of the ethical conception that both novels narratively undermine. According to Kant an action can be characterized as a morally successful action only when practical reason chooses freely and without giving in to impulses (Otfried Höffe, Immanuel Kant (München: Beck, 2000), 174). Moreover, Kantian philosophy states that, when our understanding formulates a reason, it must become necessarily the action’s motive; the agent must try to carry it out, otherwise we are dealing with a case of akrasia, a problem of irrationality that will be dealt with in this chapter from the analytical philosophical angle. This practical itinerary implies, firstly, that reason should be autonomous and, secondly, that the form of its reflections—independently from its contents—should be the efficient cause. Both requirements allude to the Faktum der Vernunft: “And for Kant, in the context of morality, it is not enough for an action “from reason” that reason be the immediate cause of the action; it would have to be the ultimate cause as well. This requires that the individual agent not only operate “through” reason in some psychological or evaluative sense (that would be sufficient for a compatibilist), but also that, in its willing, it be literally an uncaused cause” (Karl Ameriks, “Pure Reason of Itself Alone Suffices to Determine the Will (42–57)”, in Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, ed. Otfried Höffe (Berlin: Akademie, 2011), 90). However, despite being the cause, the form cannot be a motive because it does not belong to the empirical dimension: “Es gibt also zwei mentale Zustände, die hier eine Rolle spielen, das Bewußtsein des Gesetzes und die Achtung. Beide werden von Kant als ‘Triebfedern’ bezeichnet. Darin liegt zwar eine terminologische Ungenauigkeit, aber keine Inkonsistenz. Sowohl das Gesetz als auch die Achtung können als ‘Triebfedern’ bezeichnet werden, weil die beiden nach Kant in einem Kausalverhältnis zueinanderstehen. Das Gesetz als die ‘eigentliche’ Triebfeder bewirkt in uns die Achtung für das Gesetz, ein moralisches Gefühl, das dann innerhalb der Sinnenwelt die Rolle einer Triebfeder, also eines Motivs für moralisches Handeln übernehmen kann.” (Nico Scarano, “Moralisches Handeln. Zum dritten Hauptstück von Kants Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (71–89)”, in Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, ed. Otfried Höffe (Berlin: Akademie, 2011), 124. 15 “Welche Handlungen und Handlungstypen es gibt, diese Frage kann man meist nur aus Erfahrung und kreativer Phantasie beantworten. Auch bei Kant kommt deshalb die Pflichtenlehre nicht ohne Empirie und Anthropologie aus, ist insofern nicht metaphysisch. Welche von den Handlungen und Handlungsmaximen aber moralisch sind, weiß man — behauptet Kant —,

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In this context, actions fading into the background and mental life becoming the main structuring principle represent the ethical problem that prompts this investigation. This textual phenomenon, however, is only the point of departure. What makes this comparison most engaging is that the novels belong to different epochs and latitudes. Separated by the long nineteenth century but linked by an enthusiastic reception of Sterne’s works, which can be traced back to the prelude of German Romanticism, both Tristram the preromantic, and Ulrich the postromantic are reluctant to rely on actions to build a moral judgment. Despite Romanticism and German idealism, traditions that – one could fairly assume – changed the approach to ethics, both novels show a common structural feature that steers away from a factual perspective and flirts, or rather, dices with the experience of the manifoldness of the world. This shift places them close to the philosophy of humanists such as Giordano Bruno, Leon Battista Alberti and Erasmus, because Sterne and Musil do not attempt to sketch the image of “man in the abstract” or of man as a cognitive tabula rasa. Instead, they wish to draw a portrait that reaches beyond any common denominator to reveal the traits that constitute their protagonists’ singular and unique perspectives.16 Notwithstanding these similarities, there is still a considerable chasm between the novels. After unfolding all the issues relevant for my interpretation, it

|| wenn man — relativ zu den erfahrungsvermittelten Maximen — das rein rationale Prüfverfahren des kategorischen Imperativs durchführt. […] Kants Empirismuskritik besagt nicht, die Handlungsalternativen, über die die moralische Entscheidung zu fällen ist, seien erfahrungsfrei zu erfinden. Die Kritik besagt lediglich, dass die moralische Entscheidung über die Alternativen erfahrungsunabhängig zu erfolgen habe.” Otfried Höffe, “Kants nichtempirische Verallgemeinerung: zum Rechtsbeispiel des falschen Versprechens”, in Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten. Ein kooperativer Kommentar, ed. Höffe (Frankfurt a. M.: Klostermann, 1989), 212. 16 B. Fabian outlines the reception of Sterne’s work in the germanophone literary tradition. He begins with the enthusiastic commentaries from Lessing, Wieland, and Goethe among others, and afterwards moves to a comparison between Sterne’s production and C. F. Blanckenburg’s poetics. The conclusion to which Fabian comes is that in both cases character construction has primacy over emplotment, and, in contrast to the epic, the public affairs are not the center of attention but man. Here, the decisive distinction is the concept of man. For Sterne, it alludes to Pope’s maxim, from his Essay on Man, “the proper study of Mankind is Man”, while in the German tradition it is approached, as Fabian states, from a different angle: “Man could remain the proper study of mankind, but man was “man in particular,” if the phrase may be used, reconstructed as “man in the abstract.” Bernhard Fabian, “Tristram Shandy and Parson Yorick among some German Greats”, in The Winged Skull, ed. Arthur Cash and John Stedmond (London: Methuen, 1971), 204. This abstract image is comparable to Kant’s epistemology and his question: what can I know? On the other hand, Sterne’s indebtedness to Pope unveils his humanist vein and encourages us to delve deeper into humanism and stretch the scope beyond the Elizabethan borders.

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will become evident that Sterne and Musil emphasize different aspects. Such a disparity, however, should not pose a problem if one desists from symmetrical argumentation. It can even prove to be an advantage in revealing how the focal point of a discussion might fluctuate and change its tone, but still allow for the discovery of layers, nuances, and intertwined motifs from diverse traditions. The scope of this research can be described along these lines: Musil’s novel examines in detail the ethical problem within a modern framework, whereas Sterne’s narrative merely delineates the issue and leaves its consequences uncharted; conversely, the unique perspective related to personality appears in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften as a faint motif in comparison to its other thematic clusters, but in Tristram Shandy an individual’s exceptional perspective defines the means of storytelling and implies an alternative to ethics revolving around judging rightly. To summarize in an anachronistic manner, Musil asked the question in its full complexity and Sterne gave the answer. One may object that an approach that aims to illustrate an ethical state of affairs seems inadequate for narratives that delve into the impossibility of attaining a vantage point: a perspective from which the world would appear stable and manageable. But emplotment, as evinced by the peripeteia, is not order’s triumph.17 Furthermore, abandoning the idea of knowledge as accessible and valid for Reason does not represent the absolute loss of all cardinal points in an intersubjective world. By resorting to the humanist tradition, the skeptical angle of both novels could be interpreted as imposing burdensome epistemological constraints and the dismissal of a transcendental perspective. To shed light on the constraints that make actions unsuitable as the basis for a moral judgment represents the seminal issue in this investigation and the topic of the first part (I), in which the relationship between the novel’s narrative program, the concept of “leading a life” and some generic aspects concerning autobiography are examined. The second part (II) is devoted to the definition of life and its function as a structuring principle that enthrones mental life and determines which truths are relevant for a biography. The third and last part (III) proposes a way to construe ethos as a living generalization. The moral character of a fictional agent leads to considerations on body and mind relations, on the foreseeability, divination, prediction of actions – in the sense of behavioural patterns. Ultimately, this last part revolves around character construction as a gateway to virtuality and an alternative way of apprehending the other, a way that

|| 17 “La mise en intrigue n’est jamais le simple triomphe de l’ ‘ordre’. Même le paradigme de la tragédie grecque fait place au rôle perturbant de la péripétéia, des contingences et des revers de fortune qui suscitent frayeur et pitié.” Ricœur, Temps et récit, 139.

Tristram’s narrative program or rational agenda | 13

contrasts indirectly with the modern ethical conception represented by the idea of narrating how one “led a life.”

1.2 Tristram’s narrative program or rational agenda In both Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften and Tristram Shandy, actions are depicted as an inadequate basis upon which to construct a moral judgment. The main objection hinges on the role conferred to the factual by Tristram’s narrative program and by the programmatic function of the Eigenschaftslosigkeit in Musil’s novel. A narrative program or, perhaps more precisely, a declaration of narrative intent serves to establish the directives and paradigms demarcating the boundaries of a fictional world. I therefore understand program to mean the matrix postulated to produce content, which functions as a systematic ability. For instance, “the experienced forester cannot explain how he distinguishes, from a distance, different species of trees, but in so far as it is not haphazard guessing his ability could in principle be defined as a programme employing a restricted number of functional variables.”18 But the narrative ability explained by the program is not descriptive, like the forester’s, it is rather a “competence that outstrips [its] performance.”19 By means of a narrative program, both novels implicitly declare that the emplotment presented by them – or by one of the possible narrative engines embedded in the novels like Moosbrugger’s case, which I will discuss in section 1.3.1. – represents only a manifestation or variation brought about by modelling, selecting and discarding ingredients from a subject, a Stoff that nourishes the stories. Therefore, an analysis of the narrative program will allow us to understand the competence that gave rise to the narrative offered to the reader, that is, to comprehend the aesthetic principles setting the narrative in motion. From a narratological point of view, the narrative program assumes many functions traditionally relegated to the preface. It serves as the a) captatio benevolentiae, a stylistic device taken from classical rhetoric which seeks to guide towards a lenient judgment by proposing a guideline by which to evaluate “correctly” the narrated deeds. It also b) explains where the text’s coherence resides; it posits a unifying principle, for instance, the consciousness that reconstructs its life in retrospect with materials from a manifold reality. The narrative program c) works as a fictional pact; it grounds the veracity of the story, states whether the

|| 18 Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics (London/New York: Routledge, 2002), 10. 19 Culler refers to Chomsky’s distinction between competence and performance in Structuralist Poetics, 10.

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reader is dealing with a fictional or true account, and determines the true regime on which the author based his selection of events. Furthermore, the question about truth d) also relates to the story’s genesis and encompasses the material circumstances, stages of the writing process, sources used, and even the acknowledgements to all the people that assisted or obstructed the text’s birth. In the case of Sterne’s novel, all these elements result in a doubling. Tristram’s writing gives birth to a Doppelgänger because the genesis of the text overlaps with the subject matter, i.e., the life of its author. A preface or, in this case, narrative program, also establishes e) the intended audience and its competence; f) clarifies the title and explains which life and whose opinions the reader is about to hear; g) reveals where the real sense of the work lies; and, lastly, g) the narrative program raises expectations regarding the individual chapters, for instance, Tristram’s promise of chapters about door-knobs, buttons, etc.20 Given that the novel never actually gets to narrate the deeds from Tristram’s life, these functions become the narration’s conduits, leading us to flirt with the perhaps exaggerated interpretation that Sterne’s novel is merely a very long preface, a scrupulous manual for the correct assessment of a life’s actions. In any case, the narrative program works as a fictional pact that creates expectations about its topics and genre, declares the possible contents of their fictional world and shapes its borders. Therefore, by analyzing the boundaries raised by the narrative to contain the fictional world, one can examine to what extent the troublesome relationship towards facts and actions is part of the novels’ core conception. The suspicion starts with the critical examination of action’s predominant role, which leads to a resignification of the life concept; after all, the end-product of biographical writing depends on what one understands under the bio in biography. Life might refer to actions that insert themselves into the factual dimension and become observable, but are we so certain that autobiography depends on reference, as a photograph depends on its subject or a (realistic) picture on its model? We assume that life produces the autobiography as an act produces its consequences, but can we not suggest, with equal justice, that the autobiographical project may itself produce and determine the life and that whatever the writer does is in fact governed by the technical demands of self-portraiture and thus determined, in all its aspects, by the resources of his medium?21

At first glance, Tristram plans to give an account of his actions and declares so at the beginning of his story: “I have undertaken, you see, to write not only my life,

|| 20 Gérard Genette, Seuils (Paris: Seuil, 1987), 182–218. 21 Paul de Man, “Autobiography as De-facement”, Modern Language Notes 94 no. 5 (1979): 920.

Tristram’s narrative program or rational agenda | 15

but my opinions also; hoping and expecting that your knowledge of my character, and of what kind of a mortal I am, by the one, would give you a better relish for the other.” (I, iv, 9) With these words Tristram fixes his narrative agenda: it is supposed to be an autobiography – fictional in this case – that aims to build a complete image of his narrative identity relying mainly on two elements: life and opinions. Now both life and opinions are quite common ingredients of an autobiography, which struggles between referential constraints and the search for a “deeper truth”, a truth grounded in the authenticity of a story that captures a unique worldview.22 In this context though, the contraposition gives a specific meaning to “life” and reduces it to factual life, to how one person is inserted in the physical dimension of the world. Consequently, factual life comprises the misfortunes and the strokes of luck, as well as the way someone faces these different situations by acting and trying to steer one’s life. This take on life encourages a reading of Tristram’s story as a narrative of how a person led his or her life. To compose the story of a character who led a life, Tristram employs the narrative repertoire handed down to him. By manipulating various stylistic resources, he can demonstrate whether he had control over different situations, as well as the possibility to change them by transforming his decisions into actions. This type of story expresses an ethical stance whose main premises are freedom to act and think, and it is precisely this ethical stance that is put under consideration through the narrative. This reading of Tristram Shandy is more convincing if we bear in mind that there is a fair number of examples of led lives in the literary tradition. Thomas Althaus in Strategien enger Lebensführung approaches canonical novels of the German language tradition in the 19th century from this angle. His interpretations revolve around the strategies characters develop to face their finiteness: stalling and buying time in order to make a decision, changing their point of view, or being flexible and aware that a course of action may be valid and suitable for just one day. All these are examples of the ample interpretation that Althaus proposes:

|| 22 For autobiography’s concept of truth, authenticity, reality and reference see Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf: Autobiographie. Weimar/Stuttgart: Metzler, 2000. 1–5. This approach to autobiography is perhaps grounded in a modern perspective, whose search for the individual was brought about, according to Watt, by the rise of the novel. It cannot be easily applied, for instance, to Augustine’s Confessions which, as Auerbach argues, is related to a figural reading and to the exemplary function of literature. Erich Auerbach, “Figura”, Archivum romanicum 22 (1938): 456; Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (London: Chatto and Windus, 1957), 60, 92.

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Die Romane des 19. Jahrhunderts […] sind als Genre dazu prädestiniert, in der jetzt entstandenen Situation die schwache Stellung des Subjekts auszuloten. […] Sie fragen, indem sie die Romanfiguren mit dem Romangeschehen konfrontieren, nach Strategien, danach, was jetzt zu tun ist. So werden sie zuständig für die Geschichte des endlichen Subjekts. […] Bezeichnend ist der Umgang dieser Romane mit der Idee des großen Individuums, das die Geschicke lenkt und ‘das Ganze’ in der Hand hat.23

Although to determine what actually lies in one’s hands is a recurrent motif in Tristram Shandy, still more pertinent for this case is Watt’s study on the rise of the novel. Watt begins his reflections on the rise of the novel under the assumption that there were material circumstances, in the sense of social and economic changes, which paved the road for the novel as a form. The novel, as defined by Watt, is the narrative search for the individual experience as it can be depicted from a human perspective. Its form draws stylistic devices from the autobiographical memoirs and is legitimated by Cartesian philosophy. Watt’s approach implies that one can rely on the human perspective thanks to the common ground established by the Cogito. Consequently, the narrative realist mode strives for a kind of comprehension that is not mediated through traditional plots conferring unity to the story.24 Instead, realism resorts to causal explanations and delves into the psychology of the characters. These are, however, only the metaphysical circumstances. The main subject matter in Watt’s study are the socio-economic conditions, like the rise of a new audience, and the “decline of literary patronage by the court and the nobility [which] had tended to create a vacuum between the author and his readers.”25 Overall, these diverse conditions shaped the novel and turned it into a genre that responds to the main values of the new society: individualism. As a societal framework, individualism “posits a whole society mainly governed by the idea of every individual’s intrinsic independence both from other

|| 23 Thomas Althaus, Strategien enger Lebensführung. Das endliche Subjekt und seine Möglichkeiten im Roman des 19. Jahrhunderts (Hildesheim: Olms, 2003), 48–49. 24 The arguments drawn from Watt revolve around this idea: “The novel’s use of non-traditional plots is an early and probably independent manifestation of this emphasis. When Defoe, for example, began to write fiction he took little notice of the dominant critical theory of the day, which still inclined towards the use of traditional plots; instead, he merely allowed his narrative order to flow spontaneously from his own sense of what his protagonists might plausibly do next. In so doing Defoe initiated an important new tendency in fiction: his total subordination of the plot to the pattern of the autobiographical memoir is as defiant an assertion of the primacy of individual experience in the novel as Descartes's cogito ergo sum was in philosophy.” Watt, The Rise of the Novel, 15. See also 15–22. 25 Watt, The Rise of the Novel, 52.

Tristram’s narrative program or rational agenda | 17

individuals and from the multifarious allegiance to past modes of thought and action denoted by the word ‘tradition’.”26 Such is the groundwork laid for an ethical conception whose fulfilment is to lead a life. At its core resides a self-determining and self-sufficient individual impervious to history and tradition.27 But despite these ideological premises, Watt handles individualism mainly as an effect of social changes, “economic specialization” and secularism.28 For him, the novel depicts these new circumstances as the struggle between an individual and his or her world, that is, the tension between character and plot, between desires and reality. While a thorough representation of the inner life shows that the character was able to manipulate the plot, a “complex formal structure will tend to turn the protagonists into its passive agents.”29 Regarding Sterne, Watt states that he identified the inherent problems of the novel and “achieved a reduction ad absurdum of the novel form itself.”30 Tristram Shandy mixes the two conflicting elements, plot and character, and integrates them in an “homogeneous” amalgam thanks to Tristram’s mental life, which is the source and cohesive force of the narration.31 In this reading, however, unity depends on the undeniable assumption that the uttered words of an individual are fully appropriated by him and confirm his autonomy. But a closer look into the narrative intertwinement reveals a narration barely kept together, in which a conflict between plot and character construction enacts, as I will show, a struggle with rationality. Sterne’s novel assumes a voice that projects unity, but within the narrative structure one can identify a skeptical position towards the idea of unity and towards Watt’s ideal realist novel, consummated in an organic composition where the character’s personality, his action and the events are homogenous.32 In this

|| 26 Watt, The Rise of the Novel, 60. 27 “It is after all only relatively recently in Western history that we began to think of human beings as something like individual, pretty much self-contained and self-determining centers of a causal agency, only relatively recently that one’s entitlement to such a self-determining life seemed not just valuable but absolutely valuable, for the most part more important even than any consideration of security, well-being, and peace that would make the attainment of such an ideal more difficult, that it was even worth the risk of life in its defense.” Robert Pippin, The Persistence of Subjectivity. On the Kantian Aftermath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 7. 28 Watt, The Rise of the Novel, 61, 81. 29 Watt, The Rise of the Novel, 279. 30 Watt, The Rise of the Novel, 292. 31 Watt, The Rise of the Novel, 290, 293. 32 For Example, the lack of cohesion and unity is considered as one of the deficiencies of Defoe’s works, a deficiency which finds a formal solution in Richardson’s Pamela. Watt, The Rise of the Novel, 108, 130, 135.

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respect, it is revealing how Franco Moretti assumes a Habermasian stance to tackle the Bildungsroman and claim that its aim is a socialization that becomes internalized, thereby dissolving any threat to freedom and autonomy.33 Without consistency between plot and character, the inhabitants of the fictional world, like in Tom Jones (1749), have no other option than to give the impression of weakness, folly, or, as I claim, irrationality.34 However, Sterne’s novel offers an alternative that is also latent in the Bildungsroman. By concentrating on the inner development of a character, the Bildungsroman advances a solution for the modern “post-heroic” times, but without the parodic tone of Don Quijote. The novel must not meet the Hegelian standards of teleology, wholeness, and internalization to tackle the problem of irrationality raised by Cervantes, because, either compromising and internalizing societal norms or defending ideals without fear of falling into solipsism, both paths hinge on mediations, that is, on the mediation between ideals and reality.35 From this perspective, Sterne’s novel is closer to Cervantes’s work and its parodic vein, but, at the same time, it focuses on mediation, even though it lingers in inner life and only makes oblique concessions to reality. By undermining the link between plot and character, between a narrative voice and its claim on its utterances, Sterne’s novel puts under scrutiny the idea of “neutral ethics” grounded in formal realism.36 The fact that the realist narrative

|| 33 Franco Moretti, The way of the world: The Bildungsroman in European culture (London: Verso, 1987), 10–18. 34 “… the Tom Jones's, the Roderick Randoms and the David Copperfields are less convincing as characters because their personalities bear little direct relation to the part they must play, and some of the actions in which the plot involves them suggests a weakness or folly which is probably at variance with the actual intentions of their author towards them.” Watt, The Rise of the Novel, 280, see also 275. 35 Joachim Küpper, “L’Éducation sentimentale – Balzac, Le Père Goriot. Zur Transformation des Bildungsromans bei den französischen Realisten”, in Romanistisches Jahrbuch 68.1 (2017): 220. “Die Attraktivität des Grundmusters auch für Autoren und Leser, die diese Parameter nicht teilen oder nicht voll teilen, besteht darin, dass der Bildungsroman etwas leistet, was der zumal in jener Epoche viel gerühmte Don Quijote (noch) nicht geleistet hatte: eine positive, und nicht nur eine parodistische, mithin reaktive Antwort auf die Frage zu geben, wie ein Erzähltext aussehen soll, der in einer modernen, post-heroischen Zeit nicht mehr aus der Aneinanderreihung von Großtaten eines ‘Helden’ bestehen kann. Das episodische Schema der Taten oder Aventüren wird substituiert durch das teleologische Schema der ‘inneren Entwicklung’ mit dem Ziel der Vollendung – dies ist die in der Tat ingeniöse Antwort, die der Bildungsroman auf die Frage nach der Verfasstheit eines modernen Epos gab.” For the focus on mediation, see 230. 36 “Formal realism is only a mode of presentation, and it is therefore ethically neutral: all Defoe's novels are also ethically neutral because they make formal realism an end rather than a

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mode is based on a transcendental subject entails a kind of ethics and has consequences for practical judgments. To stress that Tristram Shandy and Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften do not strive for unity but revel in difference marks both novels’ distance from the aesthetics of autonomy. They discuss narratively “a work’s self-sufficiency, its unity as a self-enclosed totality or an organic whole, which has its organizing principle and meaning within itself.”37 Instead of unity, both vouch for an aesthetics of dependency by focusing on character construction as an immanent principle of understanding and as a unifying principle linked to the mutability and potentiality of a thought process.38 Watt, Althaus, and Moretti built their interpretations on the premise that one can depict someone leading a life. Tristram, however, is not trying to lead a life per se. He reminds the reader repeatedly – by hinting at the narrative instance throughout the novel – that he is writing at an advanced age and must deal not with life-decisions but with writer’s decisions and obstacles inherent to this line of work. There is a decisive distinction between leading a life as a concept and telling a story about it. Tristram has already lived and must not act or decide anything anymore. Instead, he wishes to show how he lived his life, or in his own words “what kind of mortal” (I, iv, 9) he was. He wants to assess how he reacted to the different situations in which history put him, and then weigh his actions against the worldview he held at that moment. Although opinions are not equal to life-decisions, they grant access to a worldview, which might help to explain the goal of each action and the decision

|| means, subordinating any coherent ulterior significance to the illusion that the text represents the authentic lucubrations of an historical person.” Watt, The Rise of the Novel, 117. 37 Leonardo F. Lisi, Marginal Modernity. The aesthetics of dependency from Kierkegaard to Joyce (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 2. 38 “More specifically, the aesthetics of dependency falls between both of its alternatives: like the aesthetics of the avant-gardes, it presents the work’s constitutive parts as ultimately irreconcilable, but like the aesthetics of autonomy, it insists that these parts must nevertheless be purposefully related. This mediation without unification occurs by formulating the principle according to which the work must be organized in terms incompatible with that work’s own representational and thematic structures, thereby making the purposeful relation of its parts depend on an interpretative perspective not coextensive with the logic of those parts themselves. The aesthetics of dependency in this way both provides a specific standard of measurement for how the work must be unified and prevents that unity from occurring by figuring it as wholly other to the structures at hand. It generates neither pure fragmentation nor organic harmony but rather makes the process of trying to convert the former into the latter the focus of the work.” Lisi, Marginal Modernity, 6.

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behind it.39 Tristram’s autobiography offers a case upon which the reader is encouraged to construct a judgement by contrasting actions with opinions. He even hopes to win the goodwill of his readers since “as you proceed farther with me, the slight acquaintance, which is now beginning betwixt us, will grow into familiarity; and that, unless one of us is in fault, will terminate in friendship.” (I, iv, 9) The comparative analysis between worldview and actions indicates that this story about leading a life is also a story about rationality, a quest for understanding which is la razón de la sinrazón que a mi razón se hace and its role in the world at large. By endeavoring to disentangle the quixotic conundrum, Tristram runs up against a recurring concern for modernity. However, given the broad scope of this issue I intend to examine only one of its many facets by focusing on rationality. The contemporary definition used in this investigation belongs to D. Davidson who argues that rationality implies the comprehensibility of reasons as well as their role as causes.40 Reasons for actions are what one expects as an answer to ‘Why did you do it?’ They can be regarded as descriptions that depict a happening as an intentional action done by a character with knowledge of the situation and who tries to bring about a desired outcome, a possible future.41 If we extrapolate from this definition, Sterne’s narrative agenda acquires new nuances. Any claim raised on having led a life can be attested or impugned by a biography in the same manner as any claim on rationality in relation to a particular event is supported by giving reasons.42 Whether dealing with a single deed or a complex action extended throughout time, in both cases the mental life and the factual life should converge, a decision should become an action, and if a

|| 39 Pippin, The Persistence of Subjectivity, 298. Although “leading a life” might give the impression of a poor conceptual precision, it links the three key elements at hand: freedom to think, the will’s causal capacity and the account that one could give of both. “Genuinely leading a life is rightly taken to involve the problem of freedom, and in the Kantian/Hegelian tradition I am interested in, freedom means being able somehow to own up to, justify, and stand behind one’s deeds (reclaim them as my own), and that involves (so it is argued) understanding what it is to be responsive to norms, reasons.” (11) 40 Donald Davidson, Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 187– 199, see specially 190, 194. 41 Elizabeth Anscombe, Intention (Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press, 1963), 84–87. 42 “L’attestation, en effet, a pour premier vis-à-vis l’articulation de la réflexion sur l’analyse, au sens fort que la philosophie analytique a donné à cette notion. C’est l’être-vrai de la médiation de la réflexion par l’analyse qui, à titre premier, est attesté.” Paul Ricœur, Soi-même comme un autre (Paris: Seuil, 1990), 348. Attestation is a concept related to Martin Heidegger’s Bezeugung, which finds itself between doxa and episteme, and cannot be pinpointed because it is articulation itself and its extension. (136)

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story reveals a discrepancy between actions and decisions, it means that irrationality ensued. Naturally, one can fail due to bad luck or incapability to judge a situation correctly, but his story still reveals to what extent a character can lead a life. Following this line of thought, Tristram wants to find out if his goals and plans were somehow thwarted, but also if he can remember his intentions and turn them into a story. His narration shows and problematizes how practical and speculative knowledge relate to each other. He depicts how all the plans that he now imagines he had in the past never come to completion. In retrospect, his growing knowledge loosens his grip over events, dissolves the certainty he believed attainable,43 and perhaps leaves him with sheer fatalism. This slight shift towards rationality has a methodological advantage over “leading a life.” It still belongs to the same ethical conception, since it presupposes a universally valid understanding and the ability to cause something, but the crucial difference is that rationality emphasizes the act of giving reasons, a speech act that is related to giving, in retrospect, an account of oneself by means of a story. This emphasis on a definition of rationality linked to storytelling serves in the novels to undermine the idea of being able to lead a life in its transcendental sense and makes room for rhetoric and poetics to tailor, by depicting a case with artifice, an equitable judgement.44 However, before we can take advantage

|| 43 “If we put these considerations together, we can say that where (a) the description of an event is of a type to be formally the description of an executed intention (b) the event is actually the execution of an intention (by our criteria) then the account given by Aquinas of the nature of practical knowledge holds: Practical knowledge is ‘the cause of what it understands’, unlike ‘speculative’ knowledge, which ‘is derived from the objects known’. This means more than that practical knowledge is observed to be a necessary condition of the production of various results; or that an idea of doing such-and-such in such-and-such ways is such a condition. It means that without it what happens does not come under the description—execution of intentions—whose characteristics we have been investigating. This can seem a mere extra feature of events whose description would otherwise be the same, only if we concentrate on small sections of action and slips which can occur in them.” Anscombe, Intention, 87–88. 44 The search for equity reveals the Aristotelian vein of the narrative agenda. In her study devoted to the interrelationship between rhetoric, ethics, and poetics in the Aristotelian tradition, Kathy Eden defines equity thusly: “Aristotle, as we have seen, considers equity superior to strict justice because it can move more freely between the generality of the law and the details of the individual case. Unlike absolute justice, which aims at an inflexible, quantitative mean between extremes, equity approaches the relative or qualitative mean, understood by both Plato and Aristotle as the privileged position between generality and particularity. As a logical construct, this qualitative mean represents the region of the second or middle premise of the syllogism designed to analyze events by discovering their causes. In the context of ethical action, these causes are the choices, intentions, and characters of the agents. In the context of the law itself, they are the legislator's intentions in framing the particular statute. In both cases, equity operates by filling

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of this definition of rationality and examine Tristram’s narrative comparison between actions and opinions, it is necessary to identify this method’s constraints and purview.

1.2.1 Certainties and methods Giving an account of past deeds as a means to identify any inconsistency between factual and mental life is exactly the task to which Tristram devotes himself. By doing so, according to Yorick, he behaves like someone who thinks. To seek advice from Yorick in ethical matters is relevant because he embodies the highest moral instance in Tristram’s world, not only on account of his job as parson, but also because he may be the only character capable of achieving a balance between his passions and reason, or, put in Shandean terms, “the horse was as good as the rider deserved;—that they were, centaur-like,—both of a piece.” (I, viii, 20) For this reason, his death, years before Tristram’s birth, marks the dawn of a new era in which Yorick remains as a memory and moral compass.45 But his authority is neither normative nor does it reside in the contents of his doctrine. It rather hinges on the machinery of this compass, on his method of ethical inquiry. As M. New argues, Tristram is free from Yorick’s values, but his spirit keeps haunting Tristram in the nine volumes in which Tristram, as will be shown, upholds Yorick’s tradition and even elaborates his method. So instead of falling in despair due to the loss of a vantage perspective and stable values that Yorick’s death marks, Tristram’s narrative revels in its utter failure without intending to rely on orthodoxy. His lack of meekness springs from a lack of absolute certainty, which undermines any set of values and invites us to explore the scope of the || in the simple act with the qualifying hypothesis of intention. Described in this way, the role of equity in Aristotle's legal and ethical inquiry not only includes the concept of legal fiction, but it also corresponds to the role of poetic fiction or poiesis in the literary arts.” Kathy Eden, Poetic and Legal Fiction in the Aristotelian Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 48. 45 “Yorick’s black page is a dramatic sing of our entrance into the chaotic world of Tristram’s mind, where satiric spirit, with its measuring of human folly by absolute standards, lies dead and buried. And yet, Yorick is very much alive during the years that Tristram is able to cover in nine volumes. His function, I suggest, is a normative one, reminding us of the values which governed the world before his death set Tristram free from all values; it operates most profoundly at the end of the second volume where Sterne inserts the entire “Abuses of Conscience Considered” sermon, identified as Yorick’s, as a normative gloss on the Shandy world we have been exposed to.” Melvyn New, Laurence Sterne as Satirist. A Reading of “Tristram Shandy” (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1969), 76.

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ethical judgment that one can reach independently of revelation and dogmas. Consequently, Tristram’s exuberant gestures should not be seen as a sign of failure46 but as the application of a method of ethical inquiry, whose roots must be unearthed to examine Tristram’s skepticism towards a Cartesian conception of certainty. In this quest towards certainty, Yorick’s advice regarding good conscience should not be treated lightly: “If a man thinks at all, he cannot well be a stranger to the true state of this account;——he must be privy to his own thoughts and desires;—he must remember his past pursuits, and know certainly the true springs and motives, which, in general, have governed the actions of his life.” (II, xvii, 145) Yorick’s reflections address rationality in the sense of giving reasons for action, and touch upon the access to mental content, the role of confessions, and the construction of a case to be judged. Yorick’s sermon proposes a mental exercise to ease the troubled conscience, namely, putting together an account of one’s life that reveals the “true springs” and “motives” for action. Fundamentally, this is the same concern engrained in Tristram’s narrative agenda – an exhaustive description of causes – so we can assume, firstly, that Yorick’s sermon is its textual ancestor and, secondly, that a closer look into this tradition of practical reasoning would lead to a better understanding of its scope. Yorick proposes to weigh not only actions and decisions, but to include “desires” and “motives” in the account of one’s life. This method broadens rationality’s area of inquiry and takes into consideration the psychology of a person. Overall, it harmonizes with rationality in the sense of being able to give reasons for actions; reasons that are multiple and, in some cases, related to different

|| 46 In New’s reading, the Shandean narrative project represents failure and should encourage the reader to rely on doctrines or revelation. “The same arrogant pride that makes Tristram undertake his biography free from any rules and then to pretend to authority himself suffers him to reject meekness as a moral virtue; the rattling all-inclusiveness of his work is mirrored in his rejection of temperance and soberness; and the rejection of chastity speaks for itself in the Shandy world.” (Laurence Sterne as Satirist, 191) Notwithstanding the failure, the novels encourage us to think about the ethical reflections ingrained in an autobiography: “For the reader, however, Tristram’s failure to think must reflect on his inventions and devices. Tristram is condemned by his own words, and at this late point, with illness and death so close at hand, his rejection of the work’s normative values seems a final comment on his personality and his fate.” (191) According to Yurgel, failure – understood not as the opposite of success, but as an ethics of endurance – is a conceptual tool for breaking with narratives of teleology. Caio Yurgel, Landscape’s Revenge. The ecology of failure in Robert Walser and Bernardo Carvalho (Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2018).

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contents of the mind.47 Reasons do not reside exclusively in a sentence, an unequivocal decision, or a distinct feeling, but can be articulated differently and stretch to encompass diverse inner circumstances that affect actions. In Tristram’s case, the multiplicity and richness of mental life, his reasons, are collected under the umbrella term of opinions. These expressions of the inner life open a door to the mind but are not made of the substance of ideas (if there is such thing). So, talking about opinions or about being “privy to his own thoughts” posits a crucial difference between Yorick’s and Tristram’s approach, the consequences of which have to do with certainty. Certainty, so tells us Yorick, is within grasp if a man thinks about and connects all the elements that governed his actions: Now,—as conscience is nothing else but the knowledge which the mind has within herself of this; and the judgment, either of approbation or censure, which it unavoidably makes upon the successive actions of our lives; ’tis plain you will say, from the very terms of the proposition,—whenever this inward testimony goes against a man, and he stands self-accused, that he must necessarily be a guilty man.—And, on the contrary, when the report is favourable on his side, and his heart condemns him not:—that it is not a matter of trust, as the apostle intimates, but a matter of certainty and fact, that the conscience is good, and that the man must be good also. (II, xvii, 146)

Certainty is the kind of knowledge offered by a biography and differs from trust, which belongs to a more religious approach. With this distinction in mind, Yorick confesses that he wants to discuss the moral judgement that any man can arrive at. This method renounces any claim on truth, which is reserved for divine judgement, in which a believer has faith. For a person there is only certainty,48 which means that I can hope that my intentional actions will attain their goal and

|| 47 Davidson, Essays on Actions and Events, 37, 41. 48 In his paper about the Sermon, Arthur Cash discusses internal determinism and how ideas are experienced. He also offers a panoramic view of Tristram’s ethical conception, which broadly speaking has two extremes; on the one side, he places the influence of Locke’s association of ideas and the mental labyrinth that needs to be mapped; on the other, the Cambridge Platonists and their postulate of the innate goodness of man, a position represented in the novel by Sentiment. The present interpretation concentrates on the psychological inquiry and will try to explore other influences aside from Locke. Furthermore, in contrast to Cash’s position, Reason won’t be considered as a controlling influence on the body. “Like that ancient Greek he admired, Sterne believed in the superiority of mind over body, in natural morality, and in the salubrity of laughter” (Arthur Cash, “The Sermon in Tristram Shandy”, English Literary History (1964): 417). This claim results inaccurate if we bear in mind that in Sterne’s novel the moral character or hobbyhorse plays the leading part.

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become a part of reality. But consideration of past events, that is, the descriptions of the “springs”, intentions, and motives that a human understanding might concoct, have nothing to do with truth in Tristram’s world.49 The individual man and his constraints are foregrounded by the tradition with which Tristram’s narrative agenda enters in direct dialogue. This is supported by the sermon’s intertextual lineage.50 On the one hand, the epigraph in Yorick’s sermon states his topic: “For we trust we have a good Conscience” (II, xvii, 142, 145), on the other, this is not only a quote from the Old Testament (Hebrews 13:18), but it additionally alludes to Sterne’s Augustan heritage. In a similar vein, Swift’s Sermon On the Testimony of Conscience begins with an epigraph from the old testament: “For our rejoicing is this, the testimony of our conscience.” (2 Corinthians 1:12) Swift discusses in his sermon the human perspective and the access a man has to his own mental life or conscience, for “the word Conscience properly signifies that knowledge which a man hath within himself of his own thoughts and actions.”51 This knowledge is based on the idea of testimony. Hence, the parson Yorick explores the problem of ethical judgement within the framework that Swift proposes in his Sermon. Yorick is aware of man’s finite and limited perspective; he agrees with Swift’s approach: “man’s conscience can go no higher than his knowledge,”52 so man should renounce the idea of a definite judgement, which he trusts still exists and is accessible only to divine reason. A further intertextual relation that might help clarify Yorick’s position is with Shaftesbury’s philosophy, which also advocates for searching the self through

|| 49 “A hope is possible even concerning one’s own future intentional actions: ‘I shall be polite to him—I hope’. Grounds of hope are mixed of reasons for wanting, and reasons for believing that the thing wanted may happen; but grounds of intention are only reasons for acting.” (Anscombe, Intention, 90) The example which closes Anscombe’s study seems relevant for our context: “And St. Peter might perhaps have calculated ‘Since he says it, it is true’; and yet said ‘I will not do it’.” (94) 50 A thorough comparison between Yorick’s and Swift’s Sermon and further bibliography on the topic can be found in Melvyn New, Richard Davies, and W. G. Day, “Tristram Shandy: The Notes”, in Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne, vol. 3, ed. Melvyn New, and Joan New (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1978), 170–180. 51 Jonathan Swift, 24.1, Three sermons: I. On mutual subjection. II. On conscience. III. On the Trinity., Oxford Text Archive, http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12024/138860. Accessed September 2019. 52 Jonathan Swift, 24.1, Three sermons: I. On mutual subjection. II. On conscience. III. On the Trinity., Oxford Text Archive, http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12024/138860. Accessed September 2019.

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aesthetic constructions.53 Since, according to Mark Loveridge, Yorick was modeled after Shaftesbury,54 it shouldn’t be a surprise to find, in the latter’s Soliloquy or Advice to an Author, a fragment that contains many of the arguments advanced by Yorick and Swift: Go to the Poets, and they will present you with many Instances. Nothing is more common with them, than this sort of Soliloquy. A Person of profound Parts, or perhaps of ordinary Capacity, happens, on some occasion, to commit a Fault. He is concern’d for it. He comes alone upon the Stage; looks about him, to see if any body be near; then he takes himself to task, without sparing himself in the least. You wou’d wonder to hear how close he pushes matters, and how thoroughly he carries on the Business of Self-Dissection. By virtue of this Soliloquy he becomes two distinct Persons. He is Pupil and Preceptor. 55

For Shaftesbury, the man who thinks is not necessarily someone of “profound parts,” but any ordinary man, someone who, assailed by his faults, starts looking for the true springs of his actions and makes use of soliloquy to delve into the life of the mind and dissect it. The poet is the most suitable person for this task thanks to his mastery over language and his ability to outline diverse personalities. Regarding this point, Shaftesbury also reveals his humanist vein. He considers the construction of a unique case as a poet’s task: “And for this an Artist who draws naturally, t’is not enough to shew us merely Faces which may be call’d Men’s: Every Face must be a certain Man’s.”56 Tristram’s project belongs to this tradition. He wants to draw a unique individual, himself. This should not pose a problem, since he can rely more or less on his memory to depict different scenes from his life. However, Sterne’s novel adds a further constraint to his method. While Yorick severs any truth pretensions, Tristram’s project entails a more taxing burden by developing a certainty that is not grounded in the Self’s privileged access to the contents of the mind. Here, the key item is confessing. Whether I confess to a third party or to myself, I never question the legitimacy of my motives, desires, and thoughts. One usually assumes that the mental states

|| 53 Bruni Roccia gives a thorough account of Shaftesbury’s influence on Tristram Shandy’s method of constructing and inquiring after the Self. Relevant for the present argument is that, for Shaftesbury, moral character is the key to the Self and its experience of the world’s manifoldness. Gioiella Bruni Roccia, “Sterne and Shaftesbury Reconsidered: The ‘Characteristics’ of Tristram Shandy”, The Shandean 25 (2014): 69, 70, 72. 54 Mark Loveridge, Laurence Sterne and the Argument about Design (London: Macmillan, 1982), 194–195. 55 Anthony Ashley Cooper Shaftesbury, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, vol. 1, ed. Philip Ayres (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999), 87. 56 Shaftesbury, Characteristicks of Men, 108.

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that I ascribe to myself may be biased, but they are reliable. Accordingly, the certainty determined by Yorick depends on the access that each person has to his or her own mind: ‘In other matters we may be deceived by false appearances; and, as the wise man complains, hardly do we guess aright at the things that are upon the earth, and with labour do we find the things that are before us. But here the mind has all the evidence and facts within herself;——is conscious of the web she has wove;——knows its texture and fineness, and the exact share which every passion has had in working upon the several designs which virtue or vice has planned before her.’ (II, xvii, 145–146)

The assumption that the contents of the mind are clear to the mind itself, and that this may help to answer any questions regarding our conscience, is also discussed in Swift’s The Difficulty of Knowing Oneself, another source for Yorick’s sermon. In that text, Swift explores repentance, but does not tackle directly the problem of a good or bad conscience. Instead, he shows that repentance can be faked with tears or gestures. Even the mind, despite its privileged access to its contents, can have a hard time repenting. The main obstacle is, as Swift argues with his Sermon, that “man is generally the most ignorant creature in the world of himself.”57 If we fail to find ourselves guilty, it is because “we very seldom converse with ourselves.”58 A solution to this problem was already offered by Shaftesbury. We must start talking to ourselves, dissecting the self by means of a soliloquy, so we can pinpoint our guilt and repent. Both Swift’s proposal concerning conscience and Yorick’s sermon revolve around Shaftesbury’s praise of soliloquy as self-dissection, but they do not agree in every detail. While Yorick wants to build a comprehensive judgment of “the actions of his life,” Swift reduces the scope of the moral judgment to punctual actions, to simple cases, because “to pursue the heart of man through all the instances of life, in all its several windings and turnings, and under that infinite variety of shapes and appearances which it putteth on, would be a difficult and almost impossible undertaking.”59 Tristram and Yorick follow Swift against his will and place the totality of a life under scrutiny, which for Tristram turns out to be an unattainable feat. || 57 Jonathan Swift, 24.1, The difficulty of knowing one's self. A sermon, Oxford Text Archive, http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12024/138861. Accessed September 2019. 58 Jonathan Swift, 24.1, The difficulty of knowing one's self. A sermon, Oxford Text Archive, http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12024/138861. Accessed September 2019. 59 Jonathan Swift, 24.1, The difficulty of knowing one's self. A sermon, Oxford Text Archive, http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12024/138861. Accessed September 2019.

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Soliloquy and confession rely on privileged access to one own’s mind. This makes plausible any ascription of mental content to oneself or to a third party, and this is where Tristram’s project deviates from his predecessors. He does not rely directly on mental life and must take a detour through opinions to assess the role that decisions played in an event. Opinions should be systematized to reconstruct a worldview and ground any inference regarding the reasons behind actions. Tristram could have resorted to various forms of psycho-narration, that is, he could have employed conventional means to depict minds inside the diegesis, but he opts for the circuitous route of opinions, reinforcing thereby his skeptical position towards the Cartesian idea that “nothing is closer to the mind than the mind itself.”60 Tristram’s program disputes indirectly the accessibility of the mind. His method postulates a framework for the construction of a moral judgement without the need for first-person legitimacy. His reluctance to speculate about the contents of the mind might even be at odds with our definition of rationality, since giving reasons and understanding them implies the attribution of beliefs and desires,61 attributions that the narrator avoids. However, by refusing to ascribe mental states, contents or reports, the type of judgement that Tristram seeks results somewhat unreliable. At the same time, it allows for the possibility of judging the self as another, by postulating the opinions as a means to circumvent direct contact and approach the mind indirectly. In other words, opinions create a gap through which the emergence of unique perspectives becomes possible. The skepticism in Sterne’s novel leads to a fragile and brittle certainty that relies mainly on a traditional repertoire to construct a moral character through a narration. It is a certainty grounded in the process of narrating.62 By doing this the novel flees the Cartesian conception in which, thanks to a privileged access to the mind one can dissect the mental images provided by the eye of the mind and attain a type of certainty that would correspond to general and universal

|| 60 Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 58. 61 Davidson, Essays on Actions and Events, 190, 194. 62 Ricœur explores how a narration can at the same time build a narrative identity and posit an ethical life plan (Soi-même comme un autre, 202–211). The truth of this narrative is the certainty within the reach of a finite reason and scattered throughout the texture: “ce dont elle dit l’êtrevrai, c’est le soi; et elle le fait à travers les médiations objectivantes du langage, de l’action, du récit, des prédicats éthiques et moraux de l’action.” (350)

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knowledge.63 Instead, the knowledge depicted in the novel resides in the struggle to convey, through handed down stylistic devices, the uniqueness of a life. Tristram cannot count on the reader recognizing his sincerity, because even he himself cannot be certain of his memories. He has an external perspective on himself, so he can only rely on the literary tradition, on his ability to use traditional means and stylistic devices to his advantage, and also on a community that can disentangle his narrative conundrums.64 In this regard, the declaration of his narrative agenda serves to compensate for the sincerity legitimized by the privileged access to the mind. It provides the necessary framework for the reader to decide if the narrator is being sincere, in the sense that the narrator adheres to what he established as the “set believed to be true.”65 However, truth, for Tristram, does not refer to the correspondence between claims and facts, but to the redefinition of life, which will be analyzed in the second part of this investigation. For the moment, let us say that the certainty attained resides in the narrative construction itself and cannot breach the diegetic boundaries. Lastly, the novel’s skeptical position towards the idea that the closest element to mind is the mind itself relates to its genre. As fictional autobiography,

|| 63 Rorty argues that there is a prevailing Cartesian misconception that posits a very blunt separation between physical and mental, which leads us to think that the person has privileged access to his mental states, and that this access to the realm of ideas equals an access to universals. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 35–37. 64 Rorty’s mistrust of the relationship between certainty and universals allows us to reflect on Ricœur’s position. Ricœur (Temps et récit, 84–86) seems to rely on a Reason defined by its capacity to follow a story. However, followability, together with the idea that the attribution of a mental state to a third entails an attribution to the Self seem to offer a vantage point. Although it would be naïve to state that Ricœur does not consider the hermeneutical constraints, the reader he presupposes seems to be the counterpart to the competent narrator, whose existence is criticized by Pavel as an offshoot of the Cartesian subject: “The very notion of the speaker as the unique originator and master of his own utterances becomes difficult to maintain. The contemporary linguistic notion of an ideal speaker in possession of an elaborate linguistic competence, knowing his syntax, the meanings of words, the speech-act rules controlling his beliefs and expectations is a modern offshoot of the Cartesian subject, that motionless master of an inner space entirely under his control.” Pavel, Fictional Worlds, 22. The argument that Pavel develops is based on the impossibility of a commitment to the truth of all the sentences contained in any discourse. A narration, as well as claims made in life, rely on a community of experts who can gloss, if needed, any word. However, are there unfollowable stories? 65 “In order to follow the sincerity rule scrupulously, a speaker has to be transparent to himself with respect to his beliefs; but since his linguistic competence enables a speaker to utter an astronomically large number of assertions, the sincere speaker must possess a set of propositions he believes in, and a machinery able to select quickly for each of the assertive utterances the corresponding sentence belonging to the set believed to be true.” Pavel, Fictional Worlds, 20.

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the novel breaks the autobiographical pact from the beginning to show that the stylistic devices are the same for any autobiographical account, regardless of the reference. What defines them are pragmatic constraints. Perhaps Tristram tends to include every scene and show the complexity of the events because he is not writing a deposition. However, a more convincing argument about the external perspective on the narrated Self is how Tristram experiences a fictionalization: “was it not that my Opinions will be the death of me, I perceive I shall lead a fine life of it out of this self-same life of mine; or, in other words, shall lead a couple of fine lives together.” (IV, xiii, 342) A biographical endeavor leads to a double life: a narrated one, together with a life devoted to writing, a double life that splits the personality and the individual identity. The theme of the double and the unreliability of memory render impossible the attribution of a mental state to the past Self. Opinions carry the full responsibility of portraying the mental life. However, dealing with opinions is a problem in itself and even puts both of Tristram’s lives in jeopardy: the narrated one won’t be concluded due to the incessant amount of opinions, and the old writer will wither away by trying to include every detail of both lives.

1.2.2 Prerequisites: ideal and factual ingredients Opinions can turn into a writer’s nightmare, if she or he promises to include each and every one of them and, like Tristram, relentlessly endeavors to keep such a promise to match his decision to his actions. In such a task, past opinions become only one category among a panoply of items assailing a narrator who tries to put onto paper all details of his life because “nothing which has touched me will be thought trifling in its nature, or tedious in its telling.” (I, iv, 9) Whether an obscure conversation, an outdated theory, or a spontaneous idea, all help to understand how the world and its inhabitants work; all are part of a “search for coherence and meaning”66 that advances a case upon which one could build a moral judgment. But the judgment will never come because, instead of being selective, Tristram surrenders himself to his obsessive mind. He will not obtain a clear image of his past since there is no limit to what can be found with plenty of time to reconstruct opinions and events. The diverse descriptions and ramifications of a single event continuously postpone narrative progress. Confronted with these requirements, his present as a writer will also develop a problematic relationship || 66 Roccia, “Sterne and Shaftesbury Reconsidered”, 72.

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to actions. To narrate an event requires more time than the narrated event, so he probably leads a sedentary life and has become the voice of practical knowledge of his past life, “for he might be said to know how to do things if he could give a lecture on it, though he was helpless when confronted with the task of doing them.”67 He knows that a situation might look so-and-so, but he wouldn’t know how to act if such a situation repeats, so his ethics cannot reside in accurate and thorough knowledge. To further undermine ethics grounded on knowing a situation, Tristram’s fixation embraces the multiple circumstances surrounding any decisive event in his life alongside the minute account of his opinions and their effects on actions. This double obsession is, according to Tristram, unquenchable: “In short, there is no end of it; […] I had been at it these six weeks, making all the speed I possibly could,—and am not yet born:—I have just been able, and that’s all, to tell you when it happen’d, but not how;—so that you see the thing is yet far from being accomplished.” (I, xiv, 42) With these words, Tristram realizes the extent of his task. He comes to this conclusion after investing his efforts in a thorough account of his birth, a significant occasion not only because it was the first time he stepped factually onto the stage, but also due to the accident that befell him. The obstetrician, Dr. Slop, and his clumsy hands crushed his nose. In the eyes of Walter Shandy, Slop maimed with his forceps the most important part of his son’s body. He damaged the seat of wit and fancy. Therefore the interest in his birth surpasses chronological matters. Tristram could not easily discard his father’s opinions, so besides corroborating the exact date, he wishes to know how his wit was shaped and reconstructs the events by considering opinions – even if they are not his own – as well as material circumstances. This adds up to an ambiguous image with contingency at its core. Tristram’s narration endows it with sense, and yet, he seems to be a fatalist, or at the very least implies that this incident had no reason to be.68 The circumstances demonstrate how different actors necessarily entered the stage, and how he accidentally ended up in the hands of Dr. Slop.

|| 67 Anscombe, Intention, 88. “Thus in any operation we really can speak of two knowledges— the account that one could give of what one was doing, without adverting to observation; and the account of exactly what is happening at a given moment (say) to the material one is working on. The one is practical, the other speculative.” (89) 68 Tristram palliates contingency with a narration but does not seem to endow it with a sense to which he might be willing to commit. Hermann Lübbe, “Kontingenzerfahrung und Kontingenzbewältigung”, in Poetik und Hermeneutik, vol. 8, Identität, ed. Odo Marquard and Karlheinz Stierle (München: Fink, 1996), 35–47.

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An example of these narrative intricacies is provided by the midwife’s involvement in the events. The raw facts, which are scattered throughout the first three volumes, are simple: Elizabeth Shandy gave birth in Shandy Hall. Here it is important to note that Tristram was born there due to a marital dispute and a clause in the marriage settlement. A situation that Tristram, after reading said settlement, interprets thusly: “so that I was doom’d, by marriage articles, to have my nose squeez’d as flat to my face, as if the destinies had actually spun me without one” (I, xv, 46). Together with Dr. Slop and the midwife, his parents carry a part of the responsibility, and maybe Tristram implicitly blames his mother more for choosing the midwife (I, xviii, 50). During labor, some complications ensue and the midwife falls backwards, hurting her hip. No longer able to assist with the birth, the midwife is replaced by Dr. Slop, expert in “midwifery” or the “manmidwife” (III, xiii 216). The critical moment arrives when, with no time to lose, Dr. Slop asks the midwife: ——And pray, good woman, after all, will you take upon you to say, it may not be the child’s hip, as well as the child’s head?———’Tis most certainly the head, replied the midwife. Because, continued Dr. Slop (turning to my father) as positive as these old ladies generally are—’tis a point very difficult to know—and yet of the greatest consequence to be known;— —because, Sir, if the hip is mistaken for the head—there is a possibility (if it is a boy) that the forceps * * * * * * (III, xvii, 221)

We know that Tristram’s nose was crushed. And yet, there is a lingering ambiguity surrounding this nose, since the reader can never be certain whether it was the head or the hips that took the hit. But, innuendos aside, let us analyze this episode further to reveal the threads that made a knot out of it. It seems that, out of misogyny – evinced by his contemptuous formulation regarding midwives while fishing for Walter’s complicity – Dr. Slop belittles the knowledge and profession of the midwife. Obviously, this means that Dr. Slop was not so confident in his own skills, and with good reason, since he failed to bring Tristram safely into the world. But Slop might feel he has reason to be exonerated. He can justify his momentary lack of skill. He was unable to use his hands, since Obadiah accidentally cut them off when trying to free them from a knot (III, x 199). This accident left the forceps as the sole instrument available to aid Elizabeth Shandy. (III, xiii 217) Hence, it might be Obadiah who carries the burden of responsibility, while Dr. Slop’s accountability is instrumental. However, this might be Slop’s version, which omits the fact that he cited literature defending the forceps, but the events proved he failed to consider the danger this instrument poses to the nose. On the other hand, to reconstruct the midwife’s case one must delve into the parish’s history. The doubt cast upon the midwife’s abilities is related to the fact

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that she was new to the profession. There used to be another midwife tending to the parish, so maybe the new midwife did not have enough experience to assist a complicated labor or to distinguish with certainty a baby’s head from its hip. In any case, the relevant feature of this story is that neither factual circumstances nor the plot will reveal how the midwife ended up in charge of Tristram’s birth. Instead, the real culprit is made out to be the parson’s personality, that is, his dubious motivations for helping the midwife get her licence: Be it known then, that, for about five years before the date of the midwife’s licence, of which you have had so circumstantial an account,—the parson we have to do with had made himself a country-talk by a breach of all decorum, which he had committed against himself, his station, and his office;—and that was in never appearing better, or otherwise mounted, than upon a lean, sorry, jack-ass of a horse, value about one pound fifteen shillings; who, to shorten all description of him, was full brother to Rosinante, (I, x, 17–18)

Before dazzling the community with his comical figure, Yorick used to ride the “best horse in the parish” with “superb saddle and bridle.” (I, x, 20–21) Riding was his passion, or “it had been his manner, or vanity, or call it what you will,” (I, x, 21) but, as we know, he shackled it to become “centaur-like.” Now, the cause for this change in his character, the “true springs” and “motives” of his actions, give room for gossip and speculation. “But the truth of the story was as follows” (I, x, 21): the nearest midwife was seven miles away from the village and since parson Yorick loved his horse but also had a good heart, he used to lend it. Consequently, he had to constantly replace all the poor broken down beasts. Tired of this situation he decided to renounce a good mount since “it confined all his charity in one particular channel.” (I, x, 22) The investment in the license of a distressed widow – soon-to-be a midwife within a five miles radius – came years after this decision, and this new event triggered an interpretation of his past acts; every horse was remembered, Gossip appeared and claimed: “The parson had a returning fit of pride which had just seized him; and he was going to be well mounted once again in his life; and if it was so, ’twas plain as the sun at noonday, he would pocket the expence of the licence, ten times told, the very first year:—So that every body was left to judge what were his views in this act of charity.” (I, x, 23) As the voices of the villagers reveal, the reasons for his actions are unclear to the community. Maybe avarice got the best of him, not humility, so helping a widow in distress to support herself – originally the parson’s wife’s idea (TS I, vii, 10) – is a decision motivated by self-interest. Whether it was pride, self-interest, charity, his good heart, or his wife’s good idea, was not even clear to Yorick, who asked himself: “What were his views in this, and in every other action of his life,—or rather what were the opinions which

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floated in the brains of other people concerning it, was a thought which too much floated in his own, and too often broke in upon his rest, when he should have been sound asleep.” (I, x, 24) This fragment, so close to Yorick’s perspective, nevertheless does not express what Yorick actually did. Its ambiguity leaves the question open for opinionated speculations. Although this mystery concludes the chapter and the narrative thread stating Yorick’s case, the wording sounds too general and could be applied to any action in life and as a counterexample to Yorick’s Sermon. Furthermore, the ambiguity is reinforced by the narrator, who informs us that Yorick died after this event; time will never reveal with a further event the true springs governing his actions. The open ending of Yorick’s story renders it a riddle. It is even unclear whether Yorick’s confusion regarding his own motivations in the passage quoted above relates to this particular event or a different one: he speaks of “his views on this” but the referent is never conclusively described. On the other hand, in this context, opinion has a meaning that makes it suitable for assessing rationality. Opinions are related to thoughts but also to the descriptions of an action, to the interpretations of the parishioners who, by means of the emplotment, attempt to catch a glimpse of the intentions behind an action.69 Although these are descriptions of a mental phenomenon, they remain skeptical and keep their distance from the mind. The narrative detour that takes us to the midwife and her reasons for being on the stage exemplifies Tristram Shandy’s characteristic method of inquiry. It shows material circumstances intertwined with cultural-textual ones (the marriage agreement, treatises advocating for the forceps), and posits personality as a further thread in the circumstantial contingent net, a net where culture, the observable, and personality converge without raising claims on causal links. Thanks to his obsession and meticulousness, Tristram can never begin narrating his life’s feats. He therefore behaves like a rational agent who tries to make a judgment based on all available information,70 but the self-imposed prerequisites practically place this judgement beyond reach. Not only because one lives faster than one can write, but also because, firstly, the culture that envelops Tristram’s life is so rich that a strict account of actions pales by comparison. Secondly, a reconstruction of the factual circumstances including their causes represents an equally demanding task. And, lastly, Tristram’s project enthrones moral character as a key element for the construction of a case, and its outline

|| 69 The relation between a description and intention is explained in the last subchapter of this part and belongs to Anscombe, Intention, 29. 70 Davidson, Essays on Actions and Events, 42.

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demands digressions. Tristram’s explanations often show how circumstances, material or cultural, are enabled by another agent whose personality can be considered as the actual culprit. The search for the causes of any action, the attempt to illustrate how an idea becomes the reason for an action, has no end. A causal reconstruction can always lead to a further circumstance, whether material or ideal, that affected and strengthened the threads that bring forth an event. Analogously, the different personalities of the Shandy family are portrayed to show how Tristram’s character was shaped, or, more precisely, tinkered with by all the accidents that befell him. From this point of view, the portrait of Yorick’s moral character represents a prerequisite. It played a decisive role in the events that maimed Tristram’s wit. Opinions represent thus a gateway to his ancestors’ mindset and personality, which should be outlined to justly allocate accountability. But let us remember that, even though understanding all the people surrounding him turns him into a passive agent who fell in the hands of destiny, the development history of Tristram's character is still crucial for the narrative agenda. His worldview depends on his character and, consequently, on his own assessment of his rationality. Opinions originate in character, as the narrative program states: “I have undertaken, you see, to write not only my life, but my opinions also; hoping and expecting that your knowledge of my character, and of what kind of a mortal I am, by the one, would give you a better relish for the other […] “ (I, iv, 9). Sterne’s novel states that a prerequisite to building a moral judgment, even before comparing actions and decisions, is the reconstruction of circumstances and moral character, which, at the same time, depends on the moral character of the people that surrounded the accused and defined the events that changed his opinions. In this convoluted picture, mental life, cultural and factual dimensions converge in the moral character, who is to judge his own case. However, that the novel shifts its focus from actions to mental life and moral character does not mean that actions are essentially inadequate for moral judgment. They are rather left aside accidentally, as a side effect of a complex approach that postpones the narration of actions. As a method for getting to know a person comprehensively, the reconstruction of a moral character accumulates information that should help weigh the relation between actions and decisions. But, to make things more complex, moral character results from the interactions between actions and decisions, or life and opinions, that shape each other through time, never letting the character solidify or acquire a stable form. A moral character is defined thus by its constant actualizations. It can always expand, incorporate new elements, appropriate them, and redefine itself. Moral character is therefore in consonance with the novel’s skeptical position, bypassing the need

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to ascribe mental states because it represents a form, which we can only identify after systematizing dissimilar types of expressions, such as opinions, actions, or even gestures with obscure meanings. This form works as a matrix for the expressions of a character.71 In Tristram Shandy, the genesis of a moral character tackles rationality from a perspective that can be described in relation to analytical philosophy. Both avoid a direct correlation between the reasons given for an action and a Reason that might govern understanding. By making the genesis of a personality and the circumstances of any event the center of attention, the novel creates an ambiguous relation between justification and explanation, a relation that seeks to tailor reasons. Instead of relying on a monolithic Reason, it advocates for understanding the individual moral character that posited those reasons. Hence, moral character stands for a malleable form and it can be used to steer away from a “statically given” mind. It includes, not only desires, but also patterns of emotional reaction, dispositions of evaluations, personal loyalties, and even cultural circumstances72 that determine which propositions can be presented as reason for actions. A narrative transforms these reasons from motives to causes before the reader’s eye.73 Expressed in narrative terms, character construction, in the

|| 71 See chapter on form 2.6 “One Concern with Two Structuring Procedures” 72 Stocker examines the relation between motivation and evaluation in practical matters. The conclusion of his paper, namely, “If weakness of will, desiring the (believed) bad, is problematic, so is strength of will, desiring the (believed) good.” Michael Stocker, “Desiring the Bad: An Essay in Moral Psychology”, The Journal of Philosophy, 76 no. 12 (1979): 753. One of the pivotal points that leads to this assertion is that cultural circumstances should be considered while discussing rationality (749). 73 Independently of the position one could take about internal or external reasons, Sterne’s novel touches upon many issues raised by B. William’s approach to rationality. Williams claims that practical reasoning cannot be reduced to identifying a causal relation between an element of the mind and an action. Practical reasoning entails a deliberative process that adds or changes the elements in the mind and gives rise to an internalization of reasons (Bernard Williams, “Internal and External Reasons”, in Moral Luck. Philosophical Papers 1973–1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 104). However, the crucial point concerning deliberation is that there is always a psychological predisposition that grounds this internalization. Rationality is not the capacity of heeding reasons regardless of previous ideas. Williams’ concept of rationality rejects the idea that a “rational agent is precisely one who has a general disposition in his S to do what (he believes) there is reason” (109). For Williams, this definition of rationality is questionable because it claims that regardless of all previous motivations there is an attribute that makes it possible to adopt a reason for action. From this perspective, rationality seems to be independent of mental life. Refuting this idea of reason and mind as “statically given” (105), Williams proposes to delve into the mind and use the imagination as a heuristic tool that allows us to make assumptions about the mind’s mechanics. This premise opens a door to fiction, to an

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broader sense of a description of the interrelationship between body and mind along with its development through time, clarifies why an action was chosen, if it was the best possible action – considering all the psychological predispositions – , and if this decision is consistent with the agent’s worldview. Furthermore, using fiction to fulfill this project does not contradict the discussion within the analytical tradition; fantasy and imagination are part of the heuristic process74 that seeks to reconstruct reasons in order to assess if they were good or bad and, following Yorick, appease conscience. This imaginative exercise allows us to discover different courses of action along with their ends and motives. Even if these actions are the expression of an attitude like hope, admiration, contempt, or fear, that is, attitudes that we might not share, we can understand them once someone narrates why or how they came to adopt such an attitude. By understanding an attitude, we become aware of a consistent way of reacting to similar situations, so we can identify which contexts might provoke a fixed reaction, as well as which action is indeed a reaction and articulation of an attitude. We start expecting some degree of behavioral patterns, a regularity that constitutes moral character.75 The focus on moral character is the last consequence of Tristram’s narrative program and makes us wonder whether the novel advocates for the internalization of reasons. Tristram Shandy tackles rationality by weighing actions and decisions but loses its way when lured by mental conundrums. The result is evident: actions fade into the background and reveal how demanding illustrating a mental

|| inquiry whose boundaries are limited by imagination (110). Consequently, a narrative account seems adequate for this scrutiny, since it can posit a fictional mind to discover reasons for action. 74 William’s position concurs with the interpretation of Tristram’s distance from the attribution of mental states and a Cartesian certainty: “There is an essential indeterminacy in what can be counted a rational deliberative process. Practical reasoning is a heuristic process, and an imaginative one, and there are no fixed boundaries on the continuum from rational thought to inspiration and conversion.” Williams, “Internal and External Reasons”, 110. 75 T. Scanlon’s discussion of judgement-sensitive attitudes offers an example of the comprehensive role I pinned to the moral character in Musil’s and Sterne’s novels. Attitudes like fear are recurrent traits unrelated to single actions. Like moral character, attitudes are an evaluative disposition. A person is constantly looking for reasons to support and explain his attitude, which does not mean that the reasons should move everybody to adopt these attitudes. Here imagination has a crucial function: “having such an attitude involves not only being disposed to judge in certain ways but also being disposed to various patterns of unreflective thought, such as being disposed to think of the proposition believed or the course of action intended at the relevant moments.” Thomas M. Scanlon, “Reason”, in What We Owe Each Other (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 21. The intelligibility of attitudes gives a flexible meaning to reasons that requires imagining new thought-patterns.

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life can be. Actions have become unsuitable as the center of an ethical inquiry, but only indirectly. They aren’t downright dismissed, but need to be circumvented because they are “morally impracticable”, and it may seem absurd to rely on them, as this scene demonstrates: There had been no danger either to master or man, in Corporal Trim’s peeping in: the moment he had beheld my father and my uncle Toby fast asleep—the respectfulness of his carriage was such, he would have retired as silent as death, and left them both in their armchairs, dreaming as happy as he had found them: but the thing was, morally speaking, so very impracticable, that for the many years in which this hinge was suffered to be out of order, and amongst the hourly grievances my father submitted to upon its account—this was one; (III, xxii, 240–241)

Trim cannot avoid waking up the Shandy Brothers. It is morally impossible, not so much due to his decision as an agent, but because of a simple material circumstance, that is, a hinge’s rusty condition, which reflects on the moral character of Walter Shandy: Every day for at least ten years together did my father resolve to have it mended—’tis not mended yet; […] and what is most astonishing, there was not a subject in the world upon which my father was so eloquent, as upon that of door-hinges.——And yet at the same time, he was certainly one of the greatest bubbles to them, I think, that history can produce: his rhetorick and conduct were at perpetual handy-cuffs. […] three drops of oil with a feather, and a smart stroke of a hammer, had saved his honour for ever. (III, xxi, 239)

Trim’s innocence exemplifies what giving reasons entails in the novel. It hints at a fatalism that may seem insignificant because it depicts the everyday of the Shandy family, but is in fact paradigmatic of the narrative program and the mechanics of Tristram’s fictional world. Trim wanted to amuse his master Toby. He knew “what a pleasure it would be to his master to see” (III, xxi, 240) the two miniature mortars he made for their siege reenactments in the bowling green. With his master’s best interest in mind, Trim ends up wronging him albeit in a very minor way, even against Trim’s decision to retreat and let them rest. The circumstances have rendered his decision irrelevant, so Trim has a justification and can rest assured that he acted correctly: his decision was not the cause that interrupted their nap, he was merely the perpetrator who acted unknowingly. Like Dr. Slop, Trim is partly accountable, while Walter is, so to speak, the mastermind who also wanted a birth in Shandy Hall. This narrative design, disseminating accountability between all the characters, puts rationality to the test. Actions and

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decisions belong to different characters and are connected by a thin narrative thread. If assessing the consistency between actions and decisions defines the narrative program, it is relevant to note that Walter embodies irrationality: “his whole life a contradiction to his knowledge!” (III, xxi, 239) For him, actions and mental life are always dissociated and represent a source of misunderstandings and accidents, of whimsical occasions that Tristram uses to exemplify his character and how ridiculous it is to take oneself seriously without heeding other personalities with a sense of humor. Tristram may have learned from his father’s mistakes, but the apple does not fall far from the tree. In his obsession with a thorough life account, Tristram takes after his father, following an unfeasible project and dissociating, in retrospect, his life from his actions. His reconstruction of a moral character obscures the distinction between reasons as a product of practical reflections and motives as psychological predispositions. This approach undermines the idea of an autonomous Reason common to all. The reasons that Tristram might have had to act depend on his worldview – mutilated and shaped by all kinds of accidents beyond his powers – that springs from an exceptional character. Tristram’s explanations can appease a bad conscience because his reconstruction of a moral character can also be used as a justification. It diminishes the individual’s responsibility, makes it impossible to build a case, and even merges the factual and mental dimension. Reasons, motives, and causes become amalgamated in a story that also comprises the transformations a body undergoes. A full reconstruction of the circumstances that also takes personality into account risks steering away from what we might call “giving reasons” and ending up as mere justification, voiding any sense of a self-sufficient, self-determining individual.

1.3 On justification: either Bedlam or Newgate Justifications in Tristram Shandy revolve around the desire to be recognized and judged. Although “recognition cannot be reduced to making and delivering judgments about others. Indisputably, there are ethical and legal situations where such judgments must be made.”76 For this reason, Tristram’s desire for recognition through judgment is also surreptitiously a plea for understanding. This implies a conflict and one could even say that within a legal situation, when understanding and accountability collide, justification ensues. Justifications belong to

|| 76 Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 44.

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a judicial context, a situation of address that establishes a framework and a language which foster the emergence of a subject in relation to accountability.77 In this subchapter, I will employ the concept of judicial situations of address and justification as guidelines to continue grappling with rationality. I will briefly discuss the role of justification in Tristram Shandy and afterwards focus on Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften. Moosbrugger and Tristram embody kindred problems, and, as I will discuss at the end of the chapter, both attack the judicial situation of address and discuss the conflict between a univocal and a plurivocal world. From the judicial point of view, Tristram’s plea for understanding strikes the reader as an attempt to validate his exceptional worldview and, at the same time, to get rid of all responsibility. His desire for recognition is articulated as a justification that seeks to undermine accountability, to distribute responsibility in as many vectors as possible. The result is an empty space where all circumstances and narrative threads – factual, mental, and all their variations – converge: a proper name free of all charges, free of all distinctive traits. By justifying himself, Tristram runs the risk of losing all control over his life to determinism. Dealing with this constant threat has always been part of the autobiographical genre, since justification is not only a function that a biography can adopt, but also one of the genre’s constitutive elements. It is a stylistic device borrowed from judicial eloquence: “L’autobiographie, qui est à la fois témoignage, plaidoyer, justification et réquisitoire, s’inscrit par là dans le judiciaire, auquel elle emprunte sa mise en scène, ses rôles, et les modalités de son énonciation.”78 The autobiography, whose origins can be traced back to Augustine’s Confessions, can satisfy the cultural necessity or desire to be recognized and judged.79 It develops a case which both in its secular and religious attires revolves around guilt and atonement.80 For this reason, the genre not only involves life in retrospect but also an account that seeks to secure a future, either outside a prison or in heaven. This future is achieved by telling a story that posits an identity between narrator and protagonist and fluctuates between narrating and commenting, between two different kinds of discourses, like factual life and opinions.

|| 77 For the emergence of the subject, see Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 7–25, for its historicity, see 111, for relation to language, see 49. 78 Gisèle Mathieu-Castellani, La scène judiciaire de l’autobiographie (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1996), 29. 79 For recognition see Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 24, 44. 80 Mathieu-Castellani: La scène judiciaire, 8, 11.

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By intertwining these elements, Tristram seeks to tip the balance in his favor, to channel his past towards a desired future with thoughtful glosses.81 By virtue of these commentaries, the autobiographer can assume the role of the defendant and stage a trial with his narration, that is, a specific situation of address that conditions the construction of a judgement. Its scope and focus presuppose a Self invested with causal agency and accountable for his acts.82 But since it is a staging, the narrator can also assign the roles: I see plainly, Sir, by your looks (or as the case happened), my father would say—that you do not heartily subscribe to this opinion of mine,—[…],—I own has an air more of fancy than of solid reasoning in it;——and yet, my dear Sir, if I may presume to know your character, I am morally assured, I should hazard little in stating a case to you,—not as a party in the dispute,—but as a judge, and trusting my appeal upon it to your own good sense and candid disquisition in this matter;——you are a person free from as many narrow prejudices of education as most men; […] (I, xix, 58)

|| 81 Defining features of the autobiography are: “l’identité, au moins postulée, du narrateur et du héros de la narration, le compromis ou l’alternance entre récit et discours, narration et commentaire, et l’instauration d’une double relation, rétrospective et prospective, entre le scripteur et son passé, le scripteur et son avenir. Un ensemble de motifs composent ce qu’on appellera la topique du genre, dont la rhétorique se définit par le recours au modèle du discours judiciaire.” Mathieu-Castellani: La scène judiciaire, 19. 82 Although Butler argues that recognition and apprehension of the other should extend beyond guilt and a judicial staging (Giving an Account of Oneself, 44), her reflections depart from the defining role of the situation of address, a situation that is in some cases a trial. By using the address as a pivotal situation and crucial concept, Butler discusses Levinas’ definition of Otherness. The Other can only be apprehended in the phenomenological face-to-face encounter that surpasses language. Accordingly, for Butler, ethics should have a broader scope that surpasses a judgement, since this judicial situation does not reveal the Other as unthematizable, as Other who cannot be reduced to concepts. To overcome an approach to ethics based on judgement, the situation of address must change: “if there is an ethic to the address, and if judgment, including legal judgment, is one form of address, then the ethical value of judgment will be conditioned by the form of address it takes” (46 emphasis in original). The judicial staging in the novels allows us to identify a conception of ethics embedded in the narrative regardless of the existence of a will: “Not all narrative takes this form, clearly, but a narrative that responds to allegation must, from the outset, accept the possibility that the self has causal agency, even if, in a given instance, the self may not have been the cause of the suffering in question. […] The narrative does not emerge after the fact of causal agency but constitutes the prerequisite condition for any account of moral agency we might give. In this sense, narrative capacity constitutes a precondition for giving an account of oneself and assuming responsibility for one’s actions through that means.” (12)

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Tristram resorts to the judicial eloquence common to biography and depicts his life as a case and trial in which the roles comply with the genre’s rules: the narrator is the defendant; and the reader, the judge.83 However, judicial eloquence can interchange the roles and depict, for example, the witnesses as agents involved in and responsible for the events. Thanks to his eloquence, Tristram can get rid of his responsibility and make the Shandy clan accountable. He can even invert the situation and draw attention towards society, argue that he is innocent, another victim of circumstance.84 This inversion is implicit in the above cited fragment in which Tristram starts by asking the reader to be lenient with him, to suspend his doxa, leave conventionality aside, and handle critically the knowledge handed down to him to build an appropriate judgment.85 This should not pose a problem for someone who has – as Tristram flatteringly puts it – “good sense” and “candid disquisition.” The narrator charms his judges by stating that he knows himself to be in good hands, his future depending on a “character” that won’t put Tristram in “hazard” or harm’s way. Conversely, any adverse judgement would indicate that the reader did not meet the expectations, his understanding could not rise above prejudices. Moreover, Tristram hardly paints a favorable portrait of his reader, since his description of a person “free from as many narrow prejudices of education as most men” seems charged with irony, and also constitutes a detour which brings us back to the starting point: a plea for a learned understanding that requires getting rid of acquired prejudices and, paradoxically, knowledge. Apart from the constant threat for the reader who is ironically taken from the bench and put into the dock, the suspension of the doxa – another feature of judicial staging – is also present here. For a satisfactory reception of this story one must disregard the prejudices of education. But if this freedom seems difficult to attain to the reader, he should at least be patient:

|| 83 Mathieu-Castellani, La scène judiciaire, 49. 84 Mathieu-Castellani, La scène judiciaire, 38. Mathieu-Castellani exemplifies this rhetorical device with Moi Je de Claude Roy, who in a Shandean vein blames his ancestors (96). Regarding this point Stocker in his discussion about weakness of the will argues that by resorting to the psychological predispositions and the cultural circumstances one should be able to give account of the evaluations and motivations of an agent and its society. Stocker, “Desiring the Bad”, 749. 85 “[La séquence initiale] indique aussi de biais un protocole de lecture, avertissant le lecteur des risques que prend l’auteur, sollicitant son indulgence et sa complicité, l’invitant à ne point partager la doxa, les opinions conventionnelles d ‘on’, pour accepter avec le scripteur de remettre en question son savoir hérité.” Mathieu-Castellani: La scène judiciaire, 74.

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Therefore, my dear friend and companion, if you should think me somewhat sparing of my narrative on my first setting out—bear with me,—and let me go on, and tell my story my own way:—Or, if I should seem now and then to trifle upon the road,—or should sometimes put on a fool’s cap with a bell to it, for a moment or two as we pass along,—don’t fly off,—but rather courteously give me credit for a little more wisdom than appears upon my outside;— and as we jog on, either laugh with me, or at me, or in short, do anything,—only keep your temper. (I, vi, 9)

Right after establishing that everything will be included, the narrator resorts to the suspension of the doxa and places himself within the tradition of judicial eloquence, but in contrast to the fragment which establishes the roles, here Tristram is just asking the reader for compliance, to become, so to speak, an accessory after the fact. He never doubts his audience’s understanding. On the contrary, he is confident that with patience they can follow him along the disorienting road he has chosen. Tristram shifts the focus from an assessment seeking to allocate guilt towards an alternative apprehension of the Other. From this angle, to build a judgement would mean, instead of finding the main cause or pinpointing guilt, to determine and weigh the diverse defining elements for the emergence of an individual. Furthermore, the influence of judicial eloquence sheds new light on Tristram’s constant appeals to the reader. Besides highlighting the narrative instance and creating a self-reflexive layer, Tristram’s intrusions remind the reader of his and the narrator’s distance from the events, and therefore that judgment falls upon what is happening in front of their eyes: the unfolding text. Therein resides the possibility for the judgment to be on Tristram’s side, to even win him a friend by means of his flattering persuasion: “As you proceed farther with me, the slight acquaintance, which is now beginning betwixt us, will grow into familiarity; and that, unless one of us is in fault, will terminate in friendship” (I, iv, 9). With his biographical account, the narrator expects to transform the reader’s judgment into understanding or at least persuade him of his innocence with his justifications. The intrusions, which earned the novel the epithet “conversationalist,”86 assume different functions. Firstly, they reveal that some circumstances determine all subsequent events in his life. For example, he starts by pointing out how his animal spirits were maimed when he was begot: “Now, dear Sir, what if any accident had befallen him in his way alone!” (I, ii, 3). Secondly, getting acquainted with Tristram’s opinions grants the reader access to his worldview and grounds the understanding that departing from moral character can be more than a

|| 86 Eugene Hnatko, “Sterne’s Conversational Style”, in The Winged Skull, 229–236.

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question of consistency between decisions and actions in a single event. Thirdly, Tristram may even be surreptitiously trying to seduce the reader, his jokes and all the rhetorical devices rendering a judgement impossible if the reader, without forgetting his role as a judge, has become biased and empathetic towards Tristram. To win the reader’s sympathy would mean that the address situation has shifted from the judicial staging and has concentrated on Tristram’s exceptional character. Overall, the narrative program serves as the reading protocol of judicial eloquence. The different functions it fulfills, like stating the roles, framing the case, and the suspension of all doxa belong to said tradition: “Dès l’ouverture, tout est donc en place, et tout est à sa place. Le narrateur a énoncé ses règles (dire tout), ses normes (dire vrai), sa visée possible (la pénitence?).”87 To justify oneself represents in Sterne’s novel just the tip of an iceberg of generic relations that even implicitly defines the kind of truth aimed at by this autobiography. As I will show in part II, to tell a truth which goes beyond the factual includes ideas and the culture surrounding any individual, requires a programmatic definition of truth and, at the same time, leads to a resignification of life. But for the argument at hand, justification is the conceptual hinge that opens the door to the ethical issues in Musil’s Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften. Before examining Musil’s novel, a disparity that complicates methodologically the comparison between the novels needs to be pointed out. While Tristram Shandy is written in the first person and disguised as an autobiography, Musil’s story has a third person narrator whose focalizations may be close to the perspective of his protagonist, Ulrich, but do not attain the same unity or mirror the fictional pact and implications of the fictional autobiographical narration. For this reason, one cannot tackle directly the construction of a narrative identity as a means to illustrate the obstacles involved in offering an action-driven narration as a case upon which to build a moral judgment. Both novels discuss this issue, but in the case of Musil, the ethical inquiry is dispersed among diverse motives and characters, so to only examine the protagonist’s role might appear reductionist.

1.3.1 Moosbrugger’s case as justification Justification, rationality, and judicial eloquence are weaved into a trial that gave rise to controversy in the Austro-Hungarian society depicted by Musil. However, || 87 Mathieu-Castellani, La scène judiciaire, 83.

On justification: either Bedlam or Newgate | 45

more than the murder itself, it was the news, story, and personality of the murderer which occupied the minds of the Kakanian citizens. For both laymen and experts, Moosbrugger represented a psychological and judicial borderline case regarding diminished responsibility or, put in the reason-oriented original, a case regarding “verminderte Zurechnungsfähigkeit” (MoE 242). The bare facts are as follows: the allegedly insane Moosbrugger stabbed a prostitute repeatedly in a baffling cold-blooded manner. Later in court he claimed that regardless of his huge stature and strength he was scared and killed her out of fear. Moosbrugger’s defense argument is a life-long fear of women mixed with unfavorable circumstances: “Herr Gerichtsrat,” antwortet Moosbrugger lächelnd “sie war schmeichelhaft geworden. Ich stellte sie mir noch grausamer vor, als ich derlei Weiber sonst einschätze. Ich sehe wohl kräftig aus, bin es auch–“ “Nun also,” brummt der Vorsitzende, im Akt blätternd. “Aber in gewissen Situationen,” sagt Moosbrugger laut “bin ich ängstlich und sogar feig.” (MoE 118)88

Moosbrugger’s claim seems to disconcert the president of the court, who flips through the file for any fact that could corroborate what he is hearing. Such information, however, could hardly be included in a factual report. To deduce an enduring mental trait from the single movements which comprise actions, and afterward pin said trait on Moosbrugger represents a category mistake. From a skeptical viewpoint, one might attribute an intention to be fulfilled by an action, i.e., the murder. This claim can be made plausible by describing the accused’s movements in such a way that they adumbrate a goal and certain frame of mind. But discovering a recurrent character trait based on the reconstruction of an action that entails a plan, its execution and fleeing, would be widely debatable. Deducing a personality trait from a single action oversteps the limits of speculation on an observable basis. Nevertheless, for argument’s sake, let us suppose that this claim is deemed plausible by the court, that there are grounds to believe his fear of women. Even in such a case there is still a fundamental objection. A personality trait alone cannot hinder reason from distinguishing between right and wrong. Therefore, to

|| 88 Robert Musil, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, ed. Adolf Frisé (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2009). The novel will be cited in-text with the abbreviation MoE and page number. I also relied on the translation by Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser in my analysis of the quoted fragments. Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities, vols. 2, trans. Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser (London: Picador, 1979).

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reinforce his defense, Moosbrugger brings up the circumstances as his second argument and illustrates the dire situation in which he found himself at that moment: while crossing a deserted park he imagined her colluding with a protector, her “Beschützer,” a man who could attack him suddenly. This was a tormenting moment of uncertainty: “es war nichts zu finden, worauf sich seine Riesenkraft hätte stürzen können, und er begann sich vor diesem unheimlichen Nichtgeschehen zu fürchten.” (MoE 73) Afterwards, Moosbrugger sought shelter in a coffee house, hoping that she would have been gone by the time he decided to leave the place, but when he came out he found her once again following him, and then realized that he was attracting her: “Da erkannte er, daß er niemals von ihr loskommen werde, weil er es selbst war, der sie hinter sich herzog.” (MoE 74) Therefore the prostitute is voided of all agency and Moosbrugger considers himself responsible for actively putting an end to this situation that concerns him so intimately that it is like taking care of his own body: “Er hatte sich einmal einen großen Holzsplitter selbst aus dem Bein geschnitten, weil er zu ungeduldig war, um auf den Arzt zu warten; [...] “ (MoE 74). For the public opinion and the prosecution, Moosbrugger’s story is not convincing. The victim could never pose a threat. She was fragile and just begged to go home with him only as means to secure a place for the night. Moreover, Moosbrugger’s arguments do not impress the judge who is used to seeing culprits trying to play the victim; he won’t be fooled: Die Taktik, die der Richter dagegen anwandte, war die übliche, in allem nur die plump listigen Anstrengungen eines Mörders zu sehn, der sich seiner Verantwortung entziehen will. “Warum haben Sie sich die blutigen Hände abgewischt? — Warum haben Sie das Messer weggeworfen? — Warum haben Sie nach der Tat frische Kleider und Wäsche angezogen? — Weil es Sonntag war? Nicht, weil sie blutig waren? — Weshalb sind Sie zu einer Unterhaltung gegangen? Die Tat hat Sie also nicht gehindert, das zu tun? Haben Sie überhaupt Reue empfunden?” (MoE 75)

The judge’s opinion is immovable, and his questions reveal that, for him, accountability is a matter of intentions deduced from the diverse movements that constitute the murder as a complex action. Discovering the intentions, or maybe the remorse that a faltering gesture gives away, can prove that Moosbrugger was conscious of the morally reprehensible and unlawful nature of his actions, and should be therefore punished. This judicial practice employs factual evidence as a means to access the agent’s mind, a practice well established in the epoch. The guilt was not allocated exclusively to the act but also to the agent and the mental state he was in while committing the crime. Within this framework, the question

On justification: either Bedlam or Newgate | 47

about diminished responsibility acquires special importance since it encompasses psychological circumstances.89 Moosbrugger’s strategy complies to a certain degree with the praxis of the times. By advancing his phobia and the atmosphere of a “unheimlichen Nichtgeschehen” as main arguments, he directs the spotlight towards his mind and gives an account of how his intentions were not bad; he felt he had to defend himself. However, judge and society do not believe his arguments due to the lack of a factual substratum. As opposed to getting rid of the murder weapon or washing the bloodstains, which might prove that the accused was aware of the unlawful nature of his acts, a personality trait together with a fear nourished by the imagination cannot be easily correlated to movements or simple actions. Both require a wider narrative to gain some verisimilitude and become understandable. They belong to the inner life, which is hard to pinpoint, but sheds light on the intentions and nature of the agent. To overlook these psychological traits means that the judge disregards information that falls within the judicial framework, and discredits Moosbrugger’s arguments as a ploy to divest himself of his responsibility. The difficulties Moosbrugger encounters when he tries to broaden the scope of his case from a rudimentary coupling of actions with mental phenomena to include statements about permanent psychological features arise partly due to hermeneutical discrimination and testimonial injustice.90 As a carpenter with mental health issues, his credibility is maimed even before he utters a word. Additionally, the curious manner in which he expresses himself is of no assistance. Both factors prevent him from stating his reasons or a version of the story that would allow him to be recognized as he wants, to become who he wants.91 || 89 Maximilian Bergengruen, “Moosbruggers Welt. Zur Figuration von Strafrecht und Forensik in Robert Musils Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften”, in Figurenwissen, ed. Lilith Jappe, Olav Krämer, Fabian Lampart (Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter, 2012), 324–345. Bergengruen’s article examines the effective laws on those times to see their position towards psychology. 90 “Testimonial injustice occurs when prejudice causes a hearer to give a deflated level of credibility to a speaker’s word; hermeneutical injustice occurs at a prior stage, when a gap in collective interpretive resources puts someone at an unfair disadvantage when it comes to making sense of their social experiences.” Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice. Power and the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007),1. 91 Fricker’s reflections also imply the emergence of the I in a judicial framework: “Clearly, this harm may go more or less deep in the psychology of the subject, and I explore the idea that, where it goes deep, it can cramp self-development, so that a person may be, quite literally, prevented from becoming who they are.” Fricker, Epistemic Injustice, 5. On the other hand, Grill relates to Nietzsche’s and Emerson’s reflections Musil’s discussion about becoming not by creating but by a genealogical approach. Yet she considers it an incongruency in Musil’s approach

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Moosbrugger wants to give a comprehensive account of the circumstances and reveal his intentions but lacks the means to counter the judicial eloquence or the legitimacy of institutional claims: “Die Juristen konnten zwar besser reden als er und hielten ihm alles mögliche entgegen, aber von den wirklichen Zusammenhängen hatten sie keine Ahnung.” (MoE 238) With this focalization on Moosbrugger, the narrator indicates that the murderer is aware of his disadvantageous position, of his struggle to express with limited resources and against the biased reception of his words the interrelationship that determine the events. But he is not completely cut off from society and finds some understanding in Ulrich. Musil’s protagonist leads a life of inaction. His accommodated position allows him to spend his life pondering in salons, and, paradoxically, follow an outcast’s struggle with language: “Ulrich verstand gut die tiefe Entsagung, mit der Moosbrugger in solchen Augenblicken seine unzureichende Erziehung anklagte, die ihn verhinderte, dieses aus Unverständnis geflochtene Netz aufzuknoten, was aber in der Sprache des Richters mit strafendem Nachdruck hieß: ‘Sie wissen immer anderen die Schuld zu geben!’” (MoE 75). For a judge, whose goal is to identify a culprit and assess the accountability of the involved agents, Moosbrugger and Tristram seem to be justifying their acts and could be considered as doubles in opposite situations. The main difference is that, thanks to his speech prowess, Tristram can build complex rhetorical and narrative conundrums. And still, Tristram’s account follows a method that mirrors Moosbrugger’s hardships: both refuse to limit their scope to an event or complex action which can be dissected into units, that is, into basic actions that constitute the main event and that could reveal, like in Moosbrugger’s case, murderous intentions.92 Instead, they seek to include their personality, diverse contents of their mental life, and also the circumstances. This

|| because it sounds essentialist. However, one should bear in mind that becoming who you are is meant perhaps in a Spinozian sense and it involves a modal appraisal in retrospect, that is, to commit to contingency as if it were necessity. Genese Grill, The World as Metaphor in Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities. Possibility as Reality (New York: Camden House, 2012), 34. 92 For Danto, basic actions refer to a power to do certain movements that cannot be causally analyzed. All these movements that could be identified as elements in a comprising actionthread are part of a given repertoire of basic actions. For instance, rising an arm is not an action per se, it could be an action in cases when its endowed with meaning, but basic actions are: “When an individual M performs a basic action a, there is no event distinct from a that both stands to a as cause to effect and is an action performed by M. So when M performs a basic action, he does nothing first that causes it to happen.” Arthur Danto, “Basic Actions”, American Philosophical Quarterly. 2 no. 2 (1965): 142 (emphasis in original).

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method observes the somewhat analytical approach of the judge, but takes it to an extreme that puts the cohesion of the events in jeopardy: Dieser Richter faßte alles in eins zusammen, ausgehend von den Polizeiberichten und der Landstreicherei, und gab es als Schuld Moosbrugger; für den aber bestand es aus lauter einzelnen Vorfällen, die nichts miteinander zu tun hatten und jeder eine andere Ursache besaßen, die außerhalb Moosbruggers und irgendwo im Ganzen der Welt lag. (MoE 75)

Moosbrugger is being judged based on his intentions, on a kind of mental content. This method is though restricted to a well demarcated action, a murder, and draws its conclusions about the inner life from movements that brought about the murder. The judge relies principally on facts and his ability to give them a meaning, to create a narrative line that if one were to construct in a punctilious way – as Tristram does – would dissipate agency and depict actions as something independent from the agent: “In den Augen des Richters gingen seine Taten von ihm aus, in den seinen waren sie auf ihn zugekommen wie Vögel, die herbeifliegen.” (MoE 75) This is the insurmountable difference that renders the two stances incompatible and that even gives reason to believe that Moosbrugger may be a case of diminished responsibility: he denies that he can cause something to happen. For the judicial instance, his expressions seem to be crazy talk. But this does not pose only a communication problem, it refers to different worldviews, to what would seem, at first glance, a childish fight: Der Staatsanwalt lächelt und sagt freundlich: “Aber die Hedwig war doch ein ganz harmloses Mädchen!” “Mir erschien sie nicht so!” erwidert Moosbrugger, immer noch aufgebracht. “Mir scheint,” schließt der Vorsitzende mit Nachdruck “daß Sie immer anderen die Schuld zu geben wissen!” (MoE 118 emphasis in original)

Their perspectives are incompatible because they are grounded in different metaphysical premises; one follows the inductive method, the other seems to turn the subject into a method: “Für den Richter war Moosbrugger ein besonderer Fall; für sich war er eine Welt, und es ist sehr schwer, etwas Überzeugendes über eine Welt zu sagen.” (MoE 75) From a relativist point of view, Moosbrugger can be pronounced irrational because he does not possess the means to articulate and convey his own experience, nor can he find a common ground between their different metaphysical premises. This problem can be considered as the first attack on rationality in the sense of a deliberative capacity. Rationality refers not only to the consistency between actions and intentions, but also to an agent that is able to

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give reasons for his actions. This charge on the deliberative side of rationality and its relation to justification will become clearer after I explore what it means to say that Moosbrugger represents a borderline case of diminished responsibility and gives rise to controversies for jurists and psychiatrists, an altercation that serves as a sign of his times. 1.3.1.1 Kantian jurists The judicial discussion between Ulrich’s father and his peer, Dr. Schwung, mirrors a Kantian conception that touches directly upon rationality and, indirectly, upon narratives illustrating led lives. The main issue here is that an agent is defined as someone with causal power, but Moosbrugger rejects the idea that he can causally affect the world, establishing thereby an insurmountable difference between his position and the jurists’ conception. While discussing whether mind and will are independent from each other, Ulrich’s father asserts that necessity links reason and the will: “Das Wollen ist eben nichts Zufälliges, sondern notwendig aus unserem Ich folgende Selbstbestimmung, und also ist der Wille im Denken bestimmt, und wenn das Denken gestört ist, so ist der Wille nicht mehr Wille, sondern der Mensch handelt nur aus der Natur seines Begehrens!” (Moe 317) Ulrich’s father posits Reason’s primacy: thought alone defines the will and allows us to call it a will instead of an appetite, impulse or desire. Any interference with the workings of reason would prevent actions from originating in the will. On the other hand, his former friend and colleague, Dr. Schwung, concurring on almost all points, disagrees on the nature of the link between will and reason as well as the primacy of the latter. Dr. Schwung, in harmony with his name – momentum, which suggests a will whose sway may be hard to bring to a standstill – claims that a person who acted correctly in his delusional world, but committed a crime in reality, has diminished responsibility, and therefore cannot be found guilty. A healthy person suffering from delusions or from a mental “defect” should be acquitted, “wenn sich nachweisen ließe, daß sie infolge ihrer besonderen Wahnvorstellungen das Vorhandensein von Umständen annahm, welche ihre Handlung rechtfertigen oder deren Strafbarkeit aufheben würden, so daß sie sich also in einer wenn auch falsch vorgestellten Welt doch korrekt benommen hätte” (MoE 318). Dr. Schwung paves the way for judgments that take individual perspectives into account. The only problem with this manner of building a case is, as Ulrich’s father criticizes, the Shandean impasse, which has a logical as well as a narrative side:

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Ich habe denn auch Professor Schwung sofort entgegnet, daß, wenn die Zustände der Zurechnungsfähigkeit und Unzurechnungsfähigkeit logisch nicht gleichzeitig zu bestehen vermögen, man bei solchen Individuen annehmen müsse, daß sie in schnellem Wechsel aufeinander folgen, woraus dann gerade für seine Theorie die Schwierigkeit entsteht, für die einzelne Tat die Frage zu beantworten, aus welchem dieser wechselnden Zustände sie hervorgegangen sei; denn zu diesem Behufe müßte man alle Ursachen anführen, die auf den Angeklagten seit seiner Geburt eingewirkt haben, und alle Ursachen, welche auf seine Vorfahren gewirkt haben, die ihn mit ihren guten und schlechten Eigenschaften belasten. (MoE 319)

This method of inquiry, which complies with the endeavor undertaken by Tristram, is not only grounded on free will but also on the stoical assumption “daß alles, was geschieht, eine Ursache habe.” (MoE 319) This stoic motif will prove to be a cornerstone in Tristram Shandy and its discussion about predictions, or more precisely, about the expectations raised by the process of getting acquainted with someone’s personality. But for the time being, it is significant that Dr. Schwung takes a step further towards the individual. For him, the onerous reconstruction of a life is not an objection; he is even willing to assume its inconveniences and replies that the will should be contextualized, “denn die Logik des Rechts dürfe in Betreff derselbigen Tat niemals ein Mischungsverhältnis zweier Rechtszustände zulassen, und darum müsse auch in Bezug auf jedes einzelne Wollen entschieden werden, ob es dem Inkulpanten nach seiner psychischen Entwicklung möglich gewesen sei, das Wollen zu beherrschen oder nicht” (MoE 319). Analogously to reasons, which need to be understood if one wishes to identify the obscure intentions behind a reaction to a delusional world, the will here is regarded as an independent factor, circumstantial and also related to the history of an individual’s development. Dr. Schwung disarticulates the interdependency of reason and the will and attacks the unity of an event. Reason and the will must be tailored to an account that allows us to discover the specific traits affecting them independently from each other. Consequently, the judgment drawn from this process appears to be flexible. Instead of assuming the existence of a reason common to everyone and anchored in a worldview with well-defined norms shared by society, this type of judgment is inclined towards understanding, inclined, even, to justify the defendant. However, the inherent danger in Schwung’s position is the loss of a common state of affairs as well as of the cardinal points from which to orientate their judgment. Overall, this scholarly dispute sheds new light on topics already advanced in the previous analysis of Sterne’s novel. Just as the reconstruction of Tristram’s moral character, it alludes to the two sides of irrationality, wherein its origin is either a passion that overwhelms reason, or a weak will that acts while knowing

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that there is a better course of action.93 However, the attempt to find the origin of irrationality by analyzing the correspondence between actions and decisions is deferred due to the critical constraints that Tristram’s narrative program or Schwung’s judicial principles raise. Both methods posit as a prerequisite a narration that reveals the personality of the perpetrator, a narration that should ground the judgment in understanding.94 This makes the task, first of all, practically impossible; secondly, while attempting to comprehend an individual, both novels adopt a humanist tenor, they do not seek the man in the abstract but try to reconstruct a specific character. Furthermore, both methods conflict implicitly with the idea of a common reason, or a common ground that should have made possible an action and is expressed in the action. Actions constitute a report on intentions, ethical reflections, principles, or even desires and appetites, but to discover which of these mental contents played the main part, one must understand the reasons for actions. To know Reason or the particular reasons helps us to decipher actions, which means that the factual never had the upper hand. The observable is always manipulated by the order of things, by the ideas sublimated into an image of the world. Reason, or reasons, therefore constitute the center of this inquiry, and the type of judgment proposed by Tristram and Dr. Schwung does not posit as a guideline the mental power that gives access to a common ground. Put differently, this type of judgment does not arrive at reasons behind actions that are valid for everyone, or a unified way of perceiving the world and conforming its objects in the mind.95 Instead, Tristram and Dr. Schwung spare no effort in reconstructing the circumstances and following the accused’s train of thought, even if this project leads into madness. The frontiers that separate a healthy from an

|| 93 Davidson, Essays on Actions and Events, 27, 35. 94 Schwung’s and Tristram’s positions are reminiscent of the Aristotelian tradition, since Aristotle defines “the ability to pardon or forgive as the ability to reach an equitable judgement (Nicomachean Ethics, 6.II.I)” Eden, Poetic and Legal Fiction, 58. Both the legal and the ethical inquiry work with facts. The “dramatist, through the specific arrangements of the incidents and through the dialogue, qualifies these events by making them the consequence of the characters' choices and intentions, the motivating forces of action” (53). However, the dramatist and the forensic orator make an “equitable” and “tragic reconstruction of past events, but intentions are “inherently irrecoverable” (53). Intentions remain a mystery because narratives are constructed with heterogeneous material and tailored to adopt certain colours. Rational choice is not depicted by a Reason that can define a “single quantitative standard of value” to measure all alternatives (Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge, 56). 95 Here I refer vaguely to the Kantian Anschauung that, in combination with the concepts, leads towards the unity of apperception. Höffe, Immanuel Kant, 70–109.

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unhealthy mind represent in both novels the limit of accountability, a boundary intimately related to the justificatory autobiographical account. 1.3.1.2 Psychiatrists and rationality examined While principles and method for building a case are the jurist’s headache, diagnosing mental illness and assessing its intensity fall within the psychiatric domain. In other words, Dr. Schwung loosened the knots of Reason or at least is willing to hear reasons for action, but which utterances can be regarded as reasons and to what extent we can accept an individual ordering of the world are questions for forensic medicine. The psychiatrists’ role in the Moosbrugger complex add another layer to the reflections on reasons and intentions and center the discussion around deliberation as a defining function of rationality. Moosbrugger’s insanity becomes evident, as Lönker demonstrates, if one attempts to understand the character by resorting to the sources Musil used to characterize his mental life, for instance, Bleuler’s Lehrbuch der Psychiatrie [1916]. However, this does not contradict the fact that his case serves as a crucial element in the symbolic dimension within the diegesis and captivates the Kakanian society thanks to the allegorical reading or a reading aiming at the general which the diverse members of society can develop around any given event.96 For this reason, the psychiatric discourse was functionalized to depict a “pathologische[s] Erlebens[, das] der realistischen Gestaltung einer Figur [dient], an der die anthropologische Bedeutung von Sinnerleben und Sinnstiftung demonstriert werden soll.”97 Independently of his pathology, Moosbrugger is part of the symbolic density embedded in the bourgeois positivistic world. His story gives rise to scholarly disputes, the sensationalist press exploits it to morbidly entertain (MoE 69), but for Ulrich much more is at stake: “Ein entsprungenes Gleichnis der Ordnung: das war Moosbrugger für ihn!” (MoE 653). Ulrich grasps the symbolic dimensions of the case and is aware of the metaphysical consequences that Moosbrugger’s sentence entails: it could articulate a new state of affairs. The coming of a new age might not depend directly on Christian Moosbrugger’s acts, but on an institutional ruling, on an utterance, a sentence that could instate a new world.

|| 96 For this panoramic view of Musil’s novel I am indebted to diverse discussions with Maddalena Graziano, a Musil scholar and colleague. 97 Fred Lönker, “Der Fall Moosbrugger. Zum Verhältnis von Psychopathologie und Anthropologie in Robert Musils Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften”, Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft 47 (2003): 284.

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Thanks to his open attitude and curiosity, Ulrich understands what Moosbrugger fails to convey with his lack of eloquence, namely, that Moosbrugger never aims at nor wants to be categorized as a sick person: “Wenn man ihn recht verstand, verlangte er sogar, daß man seinen Mord für ein politisches Verbrechen ansehe, und machte manchmal den Eindruck, daß er gar nicht für sich, sondern für diese Rechtskonstruktion kämpfe” (MoE 75). A new legal construct adequate for the emergence and apprehension of his Self is what Moosbrugger strives for. His position between diverse premises and constructs is why, despite the extradiegetic evidence that resolves the question regarding his mental health: “Moosbrugger war einer jener Grenzfälle, die aus Jurisprudenz und Gerichtsmedizin auch den Laien als die Fälle der verminderten Zurechnungsfähigkeit bekannt sind” (MoE 242). For both a judge and a forensic psychiatrist, intentions are the main tool to determine diminished responsibility. However, in the judicial framework, intentions are deduced from facts and need to be plausible. If an account based on the observable is not appealing to the jury, it is considered a mere justification that hides the agent’s true intentions. In other words, it is considered an array of circumstances and actors, which aims at ulterior biased ends, like avoiding punishment. Such a conception takes motives for granted and assimilates them via a common reason to intentions that are true or justifications. Now, the job of the psychiatrist is to disentangle the interrelationship between justifications, motives, and intentions.98 Ideally, a faithful description of an event would reveal the motives and the intentions, while a spurious one can be simply called, in relation to this framework, a justification that amalgamates the circumstantial motives drawn from the observable with the intentions conveyed by a description of actions concocted by practical reason. Both concepts seem to give an answer to ‘Why did you do it?’ The relevant distinction is though that motives are tangential to practical reasoning, hinging on mental phenomena attributed to the agent, and whose effects on actions are indirect. “Motives may explain actions to us; but that is not to say that they 'determine’ in the sense of causing, actions.”99 In contrast to intentions, motives are not related to the will or reason; they are not mental causes in that sense. || 98 “Franz von Liszt, der Begründer des Präventionsstrafrechts, hatte schon im 19. Jahrhundert Zweifel an der Bestimmung der Unzurechnungsfähigkeit angemeldet. Zwar betont er, dass der ‘Gegensatz zwischen Verbrechen und Wahnsinn’ durch nichts anderes als den ‘technisch-juristischen Begriff der strafrechtlichen Zurechnungsfähigkeit’ bestimmt werden könne, d. h. durch die Frage, ob ‘Willensfreiheit’, intellektuelle Befähigung zur ‘Einsicht’ und nachvollziehbare ‘Motive’ des Handelns vorliegen.” Bergengruen, “Moosbruggers Welt”, 326. 99 Anscombe, Intention, 19.

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Although the difference between intentions and motives might become fuzzy and one should desist from attaining conceptual precision, literature is the place to speculate about the topic.100 The best example of the difference between these mental phenomena is when we explain an action thusly: “I did it out of friendship”. Friendship, lust, avarice might be mental causes only in a broad sense that neither shows a clear practical reasoning, for instance, a practical syllogism; nor can friendship or avarice be related to an action framed in specific circumstances that call for it. Motives allude thus to plausible explanations that depend on cultural evaluations and are related to verisimilitude.101 Motives are a hinge between dispositional words referring to moods, generic tendencies, capacities, character traits unrelated to an event; and actions that, according to social expectations, commonly express them or allow us to discern these motives. To have a plausible motive represents for Moosbrugger a discussion that deals with the premises of the judicial situation of address, a situation that corners him: Er erinnerte sich sehr gut, daß die Leute, die sich in Fremdworten ausdrücken können und immerzu über ihn zu Gericht saßen, ihm oft vorgehalten hatten: “Aber deswegen bringt man einen anderen doch nicht gleich um?!” Moosbrugger zuckte die Achseln. Es sind schon Leute wegen ein paar Kreuzern umgebracht worden oder für nichts, weil ein anderer es sich gerade so eingebildet hat. (MoE 396 emphasis mine)

A fistful of coins would be widely accepted as a motive, but a strong carpenter frightened of a small prostitute sounds ridiculous. Whenever the defendant fails to give a plausible reason or motive, his judges suspect they are either dealing with a delusional person or with a liar who wants to escape justice. Therefore, they must rule out one of these options. Before the deliberation with the defendant can begin, his words need to be legitimated by the experts, the psychiatrists of Kakania. An overwhelming passion affecting judgment could explain why someone gives exceptional reasons hinting at unusual motives. These cannot be taken seriously because they are the reasons of an irrational man blinded by passion. However, this kind of irrationality, apposite to Ulrich’s father strict position, is grounded in a state of affairs with universal validity, in other words, a world

|| 100 Anscombe delegates these speculations to literary criticism: “As for the importance of considering the motives of an action, as opposed to considering the intention, I am very glad not to be writing either ethics or literary criticism, to which this question belongs.” Anscombe, Intention, 19. 101 Anscombe, Intention, 18–21. The example of friendship is Anscombe’s.

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accessible in the same manner to everyone endowed with reason or to a community with a shared sense of perception. From this point of view, a delusion is analogous to a passion if we accept them as ascriptions of attributes that obfuscate judgment. Conversely, Schwung assumes a position closer to another kind of irrationality, one that ensues when a person acts against his better judgement because he failed to empower the will. The controversial feature of Schwung’s approach is his neutrality towards delusions; even while delusional, it is possible to remain rational in a way coherent with the delusional world and its given set of values. The determining feature here is not the ability to follow or abide by a way of reasoning but the psychic sediment that enables and nuances a decision.102 This position complies partly with the medical definition quoted by Lönker from Bleuler’s Lehrbuch der Psychiatrie: Das Wesentliche der Paranoia ist das Wahnsystem, d. h. ein Gebäude von Wahnideen, die alle einen gewissen logischen Zusammenhang haben und keine inneren Widersprüche enthalten, wenn auch die Logik nicht überall zwingend ist. Daß der Wahn dem Gesunden dennoch nicht nur ungenügend fundiert, sondern auch unsinnig erscheint, kommt hauptsächlich von den falschen Prämissen und der Absperrung der Kritik.103

According to this psychiatric definition of akrasia, not only Moosbrugger is a valid suspect, but Tristram’s attempt to justify himself makes us also wonder about his mental health. His project is impossible to accomplish, which makes the premises stated in his declaration of narrative intent questionable, even despite describing himself as an autonomous individual who wants to assess his responsibility by resorting to all available knowledge. If one were to place the autobiography under Bleuler’s scrutiny, there would be taxing consequences for the genre: an autobiography that fails to persuade the reader and convince him of the necessity that links the events of a life could appear to some as the product of a delusional mind.104 But since the ability to persuade someone cannot be the sole reason to convict a person, the Kakanian psychiatrists must examine Moosbrugger’s rationality with different methods.

|| 102 Within this investigation’s framework, it seems that Ulrich’s father advocates for Kantian— perhaps Platonic—ethics and Schwung’s conception is rooted in an Aristotelian approach, but to support such claims a perusal beyond the scope of this project is required. See footnote 97. 103 Eugen Bleuler, Lehrbuch der Psychiatrie, Berlin 1916, in Lönker, “Der Fall Moosbrugger”, 282–283. 104 But then again, isn’t the idea of persuasion, or more precisely, the idea of setting an example that defined the genre from its beginnings with Augustine? If this is so, then autobiography just adopted the garments of leading a life to accommodate the modern times and any other principle would seem delusional.

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His mental capacities are assessed with a mathematical and a language test, which he fails because he sets off from arbitrary premises. When asked if he can add fourteen plus fourteen he answered: “‘So ungefähr achtundzwanzig bis vierzig.’ Dieses ‘Ungefähr’ bereitete ihnen Schwierigkeiten, über die Moosbrugger schmunzelte. Denn es ist ganz einfach; er weiß auch, daß man bei achtundzwanzig anlangt, wenn man von der Vierzehn um vierzehn weitergeht, aber wer sagt denn, daß man dort stehen bleiben muß?!” (MoE 240) Although Moosbrugger proves that he understands the question and can add, he puzzles his psychiatrist by keeping to himself – as the direct quotation of Moosbrugger’s thoughts reveal – the reason behind his arithmetic impossibility. While this test evinces that he is delusional for grounding his answer in a false premise, namely, that in an addition there is no need to stop at the arithmetical destination and one can simply go farther, the test also shows that his struggle is actually with words. He becomes entangled in them. By keeping reasons to himself he precludes the psychiatrists from following his train of thought and ends up giving answers in a private language. His struggle with language becomes clearer with the second evaluation: “Und da taten die Psychiater wunder wie neugierig, wenn sie Moosbrugger das gemalte Bild eines Eichhörnchens zeigten, und er darauf antwortete: ‘Das ist halt ein Fuchs oder vielleicht ist es ein Hase; es kann auch eine Katz sein oder so.’” (MoE 240) His answer would not baffle the psychiatrists if they could follow his associations, which are grounded in synonymy and synecdoche. To reveal the reasons behind his reluctance to explain his answers, the narrator gives access to Moosbrugger’s mind by stating “Sein Denken floß […]”: “Da sagen hier die Leute zu einem Eichhörnchen Eichkatzl” fiel ihm ein; “aber es sollte bloß einmal einer versuchen, mit dem richtigen Ernst auf der Zunge und im Gesicht ‘Die Eichenkatze’ zu sagen! Alle würden aufschaun, wie wenn mitten im furzenden Plänklerfeuer eines Manöverangriffs ein scharfer Schuß fällt! In Hessen sagen sie dagegen Baumfuchs. Ein weitgewanderter Mensch weiß so etwas.” (MoE 240)

Moosbrugger knows that another name for the squirrel or Eichhörnchen is Eichkatzl, and by mixing both names and completing the first part of the compound he could say Eichenkatze and name an animal, instead of a -katzl, which does not refer to anything that can climb an oak. This similarity, which gives rise to a unique name, is just the beginning of his associations though. He also knows that, in Hessen, Eichhörnchen is called a Baumfuchs, and from this particularity follows the association of the squirrel with a Hase, which rhymes with Hessen. A hare, the fox’s meal, seems a closer relative for a squirrel than the fox, since a squirrel has teeth like those of the hare, rather than the horns in its name. But

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despite these similarities, the squirrel or, more accurately, the image they show him is neither a hare, nor a cat nor a fox; which does not exclude that “Das ist halt ein Fuchs oder vielleicht ist es ein Hase; es kann auch eine Katz sein oder so” (MoE 240). All are equally possible and plausible names. For this reason, the image shown to Moosbrugger in the courtroom is potentially all of them and none of them. Those words do not represent, like they do for the psychiatrists, different categories and animals but contiguous words. Moosbrugger’s answer is not exclusively related to the referent, but also to the signifier and signified. He is not confusing different animals; on the contrary, he is reflecting on their differences and showing that, in his language, those words are relatives. This leads him to the false assumption that the referents can be related to each other as the words are related in his linguistic speculations: “Und wenn ein Eichkatzl keine Katze ist und kein Fuchs und statt eines Horns Zähne hat wie der Hase, den der Fuchs frißt, so braucht man die Sache nicht so genau zu nehmen, aber sie ist in irgend einer Weise aus alledem zusammengenäht und läuft über die Bäume” (MoE 240). Moosbrugger’s reflections would not pose a problem if he were founding a scientific taxonomy, where names are created to conform to rules or to an international code of zoological nomenclature and convey an order of things. In such cases, words are endowed with transparency and carry in their names a sign for the kingdom, species, and family to which they belong. But Moosbrugger speculates with a language that was handed down to him and his delusion consists in living language as an order in itself and not handling words as arbitrary signs or as having been handed down. In Moosbrugger’s world, words are stitched to one another and glued to things, so manipulating words or objects affects the order of things: “Nach Moosbruggers Erfahrung und Überzeugung konnte man kein Ding für sich herausgreifen, weil eins am anderen hing.” (MoE 240) Moosbrugger’s relation to words and their function as a cohesive force of the world is related to the mystical experience of the “anderer Zustand” and to a complex intertextual web touching upon discussions about psychological development, ethnological and anthropological issues, language ontogenesis, primitivism, and mystical participation. These interpretations converge in the Moosbrugger complex, which represents Musil’s exploration of another way of thinking that includes intuition, affects, imagination and representation.105 Leaving aside the issues of his mental health, Moosbrugger’s way of thinking equals the act of endowing the world with meaning, an act that depends solely on his || 105 Nicolas Gess, “Expeditionen im Mann ohne Eigenschaften. Zum Primitivismus bei Robert Musil”, Musil-Forum 31 (2009/2010): 6.

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perspective.106 This perspective becomes a “wild thinking,”107 which is also the guiding principle of perception and posits an obstacle for Moosbrugger’s defense. He cannot give a reason for his actions, not only because he lacks the linguistic resources, but also due to his exceptional perspective. His sui generis train of thought is yet another element that hinders his defense; in principle, he cannot take part in deliberation. 1.3.1.3 Deliberation and autobiography The description of Moosbrugger’s mental peculiarities reveals how he and his judges are separated by metaphysical premises that make it impossible to understand the motives and arguments of their counterparts and deliberate. In this context, deliberation refers to a situation of address in which someone is compelled to give reasons for actions. If a person refuses to comply or fails to formulate reasons, we could fairly claim that she or he is behaving irrationally.108 Within this line of thought, an extreme position would argue that rationality is tantamount to the power of heeding to the reasons discovered in a deliberative process.109 However, this can always lead to an impasse. One can simply take advantage of the judicial eloquence and claim that if society cannot follow the defendant’s argument, then society is being irrational.

|| 106 “Die Geisteskrankheit Moosbruggers ist damit funktional eingesetzt. Sie dient dazu, die Fragilität eines Welt- und Selbstverhältnisses zu demonstrieren, das für die Selbsterhaltung des bewußten Daseins konstitutiv und damit anthropologischer Natur ist: die Produktion von Sinn.” Lönker, “Der Fall Moosbrugger”, 292. 107 Krause coins the term wild thinking and defines it as thinking that crosses the boundaries established by a normative conception of reason. The exceptional point of view instated by this wild thinking, which endows the world with meaning, is beyond the dichotomies of strange and familiar, fremd and eigen. “Weder der Möglichkeitssinn des eigenschaftslosen Protagonisten noch Moosbruggers Weltwahrnehmung oder der ‘andere Zustand’ beschränken sich darauf, dass etwas oder jemand verschieden wäre. Vielmehr erwiese es sich auf eine Weise als fremd, die nicht dialektisch aufzuheben, durch kein Drittes zu vermitteln ist.” Robert Krause, “‘Man könnte die Geschichte der Grenzen schreiben’. Moosbruggers wildes Denken und die Kultur des Okzidents”, Musil-Forum 31 (2009/2010): 44. 108 Scanlon, “Reason”, 26–25. 109 “It might be said that the force of an external reason statement can be explained in the following way. Such a statement implies that a rational agent would be motivated to act appropriately, and it can carry this implication, because a rational agent is precisely one who has a general disposition in his S to do what (he believes) there is a reason for him to do. So when he comes to believe that there is a reason for him to φ, he is motivated to φ, even though, before, he neither had a motive to φ, nor any motive related to φ-ing in one of the ways considered in the account of deliberation” Williams, “Internal and External Reasons”, 109.

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The focus on the development of an individual perspective, the shift towards moral character and the plausibility of motive, all undermine the idea of rationality as deliberation grounded in reason. But independently from the unsolvable discussion that could ensue between two fractions accusing one another of irrationality, between two people who say “Mir erschien sie nicht so!” (MoE 118), the scene where Moosbrugger’s language and mathematical proficiency are assessed contains yet a further feature of the novel’s concept of rationality, namely, that it is processual and does not reside exclusively in a solution or judgment attained. To say the result out loud would be a reasonable answer for an arithmetical problem or when looking for the most frequent word for an object, but for an analysis of actions the end product might baffle us if we do not know the reasons or assumptions that led to such a conclusion. For this reason, the judgment about Moosbrugger’s rationality is out of grasp if one fails to consider the premises from which an answer follows. One cannot rely on a definition that only weighs results because practical reasoning is not a basic arithmetic calculation whose logic is expected to be understood by everybody and would lead to the same results. Conversely, in practical matters or when looking for the motives of an action the phrasing of an answer is crucial since it alludes through language to a horizon of experience. Processuality, to the detriment of the result, allows us to link the deliberative side of rationality to a biography and to character construction. A biography constitutes the personal identity and implies an ethical reflection disseminated in the process itself. For instance, a conception grounded in deliberation claims that life stories of diverse scope and length are present in everyday life. We tell biographies in diverse everyday situations to enable social life, in which the individual is a guarantor of his identity through a description of oneself, a description that is a reflexive process in which the responsibilities and conflicts between the “I” and the other are displayed. Knowledge about our different or mutual goals and interests enable us to interact and identify possible conflicts.110 In a similar

|| 110 “Als Person wird das Individuum soziale Adresse, wird Garant seiner eigenen Identität im sozialen Verkehr. Es muss dann auch in der Lage sein, bei Nachforschungen, die es selbst betreffen, helfen zu können. Es muss die Probleme, die es mit sich selbst und deshalb mit anderen hat, exponieren, […]. Es braucht dann eine (notfalls fingierte, oder doch ergänzte) Biographie, um in der Gesellschaft leben zu können. Es muss eine eingeübte Selbstbeschreibung mit sich herumtragen, um bei Bedarf über sich Auskunft geben zu können. Es leuchtet ihm selbst dann ein, dass es Interessen […] hat und dass es sich selbst zum Problem werden kann. […] Die Einzigartigkeit und Unvergleichbarkeit seiner Existenz ist Prämisse des sozialen Umgangs mit ihm.” Niklas Luhmann, “Individuum, Individualität, Individualismus”, in Gesellschaftsstruktur und

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vein, one could even claim that devising a biography represents the last station in the moral development of an individual. The individual attains this station when he disregards social roles and resorts to principles in order to structure his biographical account.111 This type of story depicts reason and will working in harmony in endeavors of self-realization and self-determination.112 This approach to deliberation and biography implies a reason linked to a traditional rhetorical repertoire, as well as to roles that need to be critically explored in order to give an account about the self. At first glance, Tristram and Moosbrugger seem to concur with this, but their method reaches the limits of the deliberative autobiography. The plausibility of motives – which leads to the Shandean impasse formulated by Ulrich’s father “[…] zu diesem Behufe müßte man alle Ursachen anführen, die auf den Angeklagten seit seiner Geburt eingewirkt haben, und alle Ursachen, welche auf seine Vorfahren gewirkt haben, die ihn mit ihren guten und schlechten Eigenschaften belasten.” (MoE 319) – reveals the irreconcilable perspectives of Moosbrugger and his judges. All the involved narratives attempt to describe intentions and make motives plausible, but their stance towards hermeneutics interfere with the project’s main goal. Tristram overexploits the narrative repertoire at his disposal and produces a story that fails to meet the standards of a deliberation. The impossibility of reaching an end, the digressive structure, and the marginal importance of the digressions might give reasons to dismiss the idea of hearing a deliberative account appropriate for a judicial context. Conversely, Moosbrugger is not eloquent enough to free his judges form their prejudices. For instance, he cannot convince them that getting rid of the murder weapon and washing off the blood is just a description of the facts based

|| Semantik. Studien zur Soziologie der modernen Gesellschaft (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1989), 251–252. 111 The third stage in moral development shows a similar relation to autobiography: “Die Akteure können […] nicht länger als eine Kombination von Rollenattributen verstanden werden, sie gelten vielmehr als individuierte Einzelne, die durch Anwendung von Prinzipien eine jeweils unverwechselbare Biographie organisieren; auf dieser Stufe muss, mit anderen Worten, zwischen Individualität und ‘Ich überhaupt’ differenziert werden.” Jürgen Habermas, “Moralentwicklung und Ich-Identität”, in Zur Rekonstruktion des historischen Materialismus (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1976), 81–82. 112 “Im kommunikativen Handeln behalten die Unterstellungen von Selbstbestimmung und Selbstverwirklichung einen streng intersubjektiven Sinn. […] Entsprechend kann sich je meine Identität, nämlich mein Selbstverständnis als eines autonom handelnden und individuierten Wesens, nur stabilisieren, wenn ich als eine solche und als diese Person Anerkennung finde.” Jürgen Habermas, “Individuierung durch Vergesellschaftung. Zu G. H. Meads Theorie der Subjektivität”, in Nachmetaphysisches Denken. Philosophische Aufsätze (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1992), 233.

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on a model for murder that might be recurrent in fiction and reality, but similar actions are not always the expression of the same intention. The pressing influence of a tradition and the behavioral patterns it spurs hamper any attempt to convey a new meaning. As a result, the descriptions that Tristram and Moosbrugger advance do not sustain the will’s crucial role, instead they dilute it in a narrative identity. The efforts to be critical and analyze all available information lead to a narration almost unrecognizable as such and still, this intertextual conundrum offers certainty, as Yorick claimed. This certainty is linked to the process of constructing a faulty biography and to the shift from the events to moral character, that is, the exceptional, whimsical, and fanciful – even deranged – perspective of the accused. Certainty is not related to a definitive description of the actions, nor to a sentence, but to personality’s potentiality and its homogeneous reactions to similar situations. This shift impairs the judicial situation of address and points to an alternative apprehension of the “I”. 1.3.1.4 Will to be recognized The conflict between a method that revolves around an individual perspective and the judicial context that tries to assess accountability is also a conflict with the pragmatic constraints that determine the emergence of Self. To assess accountability might be necessary in our society, but the framework it establishes for the apprehension of an individual and his or her recognition as an “I” provides a specific image of the individual. In this respect, the Moosbrugger complex advances an alternative. It represents a borderline case regarding recognition. The judicial framework cannot classify him, which is a dire experience for a defendant who wants to be held accountable: Er wußte, daß sein Verteidiger sich um die Wiederaufnahme des Verfahrens bemühte und daß er noch einmal untersucht werden sollte, aber er nahm sich vor, rechtzeitig dagegen aufzutreten und darauf zu bestehen, daß man ihn töte. Daß sein Abschied seiner würdig sein müsse, stand für ihn fest, denn sein Leben war ein Kampf um sein Recht gewesen. (MoE 236)

Moosbrugger knows that an adverse sentence would grant him recognition as an individual subjected to the “system of justice and punishment.”113 He would be assimilated in a system that shapes his possibilities to be recognized as an equal

|| 113 Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 10.

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“I”. The judicial staging in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften grapples with the ethical consequences of a situation of address that posits historical and pragmatic conditions for the emergence of the subject and frames the language in which one gives an account of oneself.114 “In a real sense, we do not survive without being addressed, which means that the scene of address can and should provide a sustaining condition for ethical deliberation, judgment, and conduct.”115 Furthermore, the address is supported by ethical relationality, which is the traditional language that got impressed in our development and in which we resort to give an account of ourselves.116 This language, coupled with the scene of address obstruct the recognition of Moosbrugger as an “I”. He is true to himself, to his – perhaps pathological – way of endowing the world with meaning, but he cannot give the account expected of him, he cannot falsify his life: To hold a person accountable for his or her life in narrative form may even be to require a falsification of that life in order to satisfy the criterion of a certain kind of ethics, one that tends to break with relationality. One could perhaps satisfy the burden of proof that another imposes upon an account, but what sort of interlocutory scene would be produced in consequence? The relation between the interlocutors is established as one between a judge who reviews evidence and a supplicant trying to measure up to an indecipherable burden of proof.117

As we have seen, Moosbrugger cannot deliver the expected arguments, he does not heed the social and pragmatic constraints or comply with his judges’ demands. His method does not rely on the factual, or on intentions that could be deduced from actions or movements described in a certain way. Rather, his narrative steers away from actions to approach the mental life through his moral character. If we were not dealing with a borderline case, this would be a story of the system being unjust with an insane man or a story about a sane man who simply failed to cheat the system. But the Moosbrugger complex can be interpreted as an narrative attempt to explore the emergence of the subject beyond the judicial framework, an attempt grounded in assumptions analogous to Butler’s correlation between ethics and Levinasian address: “if there is an ethic to the address,

|| 114 For the Emergence of subject see Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 7–25, and for its historicity see 111. 115 Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 49. 116 Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 78. 117 Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 63–64.

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and if judgment, including legal judgment, is one form of address, then the ethical value of judgment will be conditioned by the form of address it takes.”118 Although Moosbrugger has a desire to be judged and recognized, he is also aware that this would not represent the experience he has of his individuality and of the world. For this reason, he contradicts himself and changes his opinion about himself: “Ich bin damit zufrieden, wenn ich Ihnen auch gestehen muß, daß Sie einen Irrsinnigen verurteilt haben!” (MoE 76) The contradictory statements, rather than being whims of a delusional mind, should be considered an expression of discontent, and, as such, a crucial element of the Moosbrugger complex. Moosbrugger is handed two options, namely, to be held at a psychiatric hospital or a prison. Both options invariably fail to deliver the purview necessary to understand his case, a case that conflicts with the manner in which the judicial context can apprehend him. A solution to this predicament is proposed by Ulrich’s father, unknowingly helping his adversary Dr. Schwung: a thoroughly biographical account explaining the genesis of a moral character. Ulrich’s father was being sarcastic and proposed this out of spite. He could never accept this method of legal inquiry, because, as an advocate for the primacy of Reason, he understands that this method would change the situation of address together with the whole judicial framework. The biographical account centered on moral character carries with it a hermeneutical dimension and different constraints, a new situation that surpasses the factual and endangers the central position of the will in the sense of causal and intelligible freedom guided by Reason. From a hermeneutical perspective, identity depends more on history than on will. “Anders formuliert: das, was einer ist, verdankt sich nicht der Persistenz seines Willens, es zu sein. Identität ist kein Handlungsresultat. Sie ist das Resultat einer Geschichte, das heißt Selbsterhaltung und Entwicklung eines Subjekts unter Bedingungen, die sich zur Raison seines jeweiligen Willens zufällig verhalten.”119 Although Lübbe discards the preeminence of the will, he takes a position close to the idea of deliberation, a situation where one should be able to give reasons for actions, and also treats narratives as a means that grounds social interaction and can help to assess rationality.120 But the main difference with the || 118 Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 46 (emphasis in original). 119 Hermann Lübbe, “Zur Identitätspräsentationsfunktion der Historie”, in Poetik und Hermeneutik, vol. 8, ed. Odo Marquard and Karlheinz Stierle (München: Fink, 1996), 280. 120 “Die Antwort auf diese Frage lautet, daß, was andere wollen und tun, stets nur zum Teil auf Erfahrungen, Annahmen über die Wirklichkeit und Einschätzungen von Lagen beruht, die wir mit diesen anderen teilen, und nur zu diesem Teil können wir uns die Rationalität ihres Wollens und Tuns im Horizont der Gegenwart durchsichtig machen. Zum anderen Teil bliebe, was die

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previous approach is that the situation of address, or more precisely, the pragmatics discussed by Lübbe, do not revolve around a judgement, but around how one gets to know someone, how we assess actions and evaluations that raise expectations. Here, identity emerges from a story instead of emerging from a will affecting the factual dimension. Such are the ethics discussed in Musil’s and Sterne’s novels, which set off from judgment, pass through justification, and aim at understanding. In view of this, Moosbrugger’s ineffectual defense is a product of his incapability or lack of will to orientate his arguments to pragmatic constraints.121 His arguments seem weak because they belong to another situation of address, another context which would allow Moosbrugger to be apprehended in a more comprehensive way. Confronted with a judicial context that stipulates through deliberation what can be recognized and accepted as a motive correlated to an intention and action, the Moosbrugger complex disputes the limits of the deliberative process there implied; deliberation loses the common ground that defines it as the face of rationality. Proof of this is the inconclusive evidence that makes it imperative to put under investigation the defendant’s mind. It is decided that Moosbrugger should be diagnosed by a psychiatrist in order to determine if his contradictory statements are relevant to the case. But before delving into Moosbrugger’s mind, we ought to look at a set of transactions between factual and mental that complicate the case and expand the novel’s truth regime. Lying, hallucinating and simulating might also serve as indicators of the struggle to escape the judicial situation of address and advance towards a different kind of ethics. 1.3.1.5 Against the tertium non datur or when simulating, lying, hallucinating Simulating can shatter the judicial framework. It adds a new ingredient that undermines both of the advanced solutions: either Moosbrugger seeks to escape justice by acting and speaking like an insane person, or he indeed has mental health

|| anderen wollen und tun, synchron betrachtet unverständlich, nämlich soweit, als es auf früheren Erfahrungen, tradierten Annahmen über die Wirklichkeit, einstmals bewährten Einschätzungen von Lagen beruht, die wir, durch eine andere Vergangenheit geprägt, nicht oder nicht mehr teilen. Soweit das der Fall ist, sind wir, um den anderen zu verstehen, auf eine historische Erklärung seines Wollens und Tuns angewiesen, und seine Geschichte bietet diese Erklärung.” Lübbe, “Zur Identitätspräsentationsfunktion der Historie”, 279. 121 “Wir orientieren uns an der Pragmatik von Situationen und Interaktionen, die das Ensemble von Möglichkeiten bestimmen, Geschichten, durch die wir wer sind, fortzusetzen.” Lübbe, “Zur Identitätspräsentationsfunktion der Historie”, 280.

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issues. Here one should distinguish between the different nuances of this situation. The psychiatrists must not only assess whether he is sane or insane to provide proof for a judge who, based on that information, must decide if this is a case of diminished responsibility and declare him guilty or innocent; additionally, the psychiatrists must examine whether Moosbrugger’s claims are true or false. Musil weaves a case of interrelations in an attempt to erode the function of the tertium non datur in the emergence of the subject. By exploiting diverse relations to reality through words semantically related, such as simulating, lying, and hallucinating, the rigid dichotomies of sane/insane, guilty/innocent, and true/false, which are inserted in the core of this character are ironically disarmed or at least put into perspective.122 The sheer number of these diverse relations to reality, together with Moosbrugger’s wild thinking – a thinking hard to classify because it circumvents a dialectical approach – 123interfere and delay his recognition. In consequence, he does not have any rights, a fact that he discovers after his wellfounded complaints go unheard by the warden, the priest and the prison doctor. The institutional powers to which he is submitted do not think or care that he is being mistreated, because he, explains the doctor to Moosbrugger, is suspended in a grey area: Der Gefängnisarzt aber meinte zu Moosbrugger, alles, worüber er sich beklage, sei doch gar nicht so schlimm, gab ihm einen behaglichen Klaps und ließ sich durch nichts bewegen, auf seine Beschwerden einzugehn, denn wenn Moosbrugger recht verstand, sei das überflüssig, solang die Frage, ob er krank sei oder simuliere, keine Antwort durch die Fakultät gefunden habe. Ergrimmt ahnte Moosbrugger, daß jeder von denen sprach, wie es ihm paßte, und daß es dieses Sprechen war, was ihnen die Kraft gab, mit ihm umzugehn, wie sie wollten. (MoE 235)

Until he flees from the gray area in which his identity stands, until the experts from different fields classify him, or until he complies with the address situation, Moosbrugger won’t be granted the corresponding rights. Now, to recognize Moosbrugger as somebody, the psychiatrists have to disentangle the confusing relations that are possible when simulating, hallucinating and lying are part of the problem. Here, simulating has a pivotal function. It is exactly the pressure point in which the tertium non datur collapses and the leverage that Moosbrugger uses after confessing he is lying:

|| 122 Bergengruen, “Moosbruggers Welt”, 339, 341. The pairs are: sane/insane, “zurechnungsund unzurechnungsfähig”, innocent/guilty, true/false. 123 Krause, “‘Man könnte die Geschichte’”, 44.

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Da er auf alle Worte, die man für ihn verwendete, stets sehr gut aufgepaßt hatte, wußte Moosbrugger, daß man das Halluzinieren nennt, und war einverstanden damit, daß er diese Eigenschaft Halluzinieren vor anderen voraus habe, die es nicht können, denn er sah auch vieles, was andere nicht sehen, schöne Landschaften und höllische Tiere, aber er fand die Wichtigkeit, die man dem beilegte, sehr übertrieben, und wenn ihm der Aufenthalt in den Irrenanstalten zu unangenehm wurde, so behauptete er ohne weiteres, daß er nur schwindle. (MoE 239)

Two variations of the liar paradox which spring from hallucinating and faking are embedded in this scene, according to Bergengruen.124 For the psychiatrist and judges, the problem is that if the accused says that he is faking or hallucinating such claim cannot be true because the utterance undermines its own truth value, and if it is a false statement it means that he is faking or lying at least when he claims to be faking. This paradox represents a direct attack against the logic of the excluded middle, which pertains to the judicial and forensic medicine framework. One should bear in mind, however, that the two variations of this paradox have different functions. Although faking or lying imply that somebody acts intentionally, controlling hallucinations would seem a very difficult task. Moosbrugger might be speaking in a moment of lucidity, but for argument’s sake let us suppose that he governs his hallucinations and that both hallucinating and faking represent distinct elements of a logical problem. Consequently, one of the most complex cases with which we could be confronted is a delusional person who hallucinates that he is simulating hallucinations.125 Superficially, the judges must discern if he is lying or not, but the complications surface afterwards. An analysis based on truth hierarchies or on the embedded diegetic levels might reveal that in the first instance his deranged perception coincides against all odds with a normal intuition. He hallucinates the most common way of perceiving the world, on top of which comes a layer of simulation. He hallucinates that he is simulating, which still allows him to behave within reasonable parameters. Now the content of this simulation is, in its turn, a hallucination, which leaves two possibilities. This simulated hallucination could be, not a delusion, but a lie by someone with a perfectly normal perception of the world. However, Moosbrugger has the power of endowing the world with meaning, so the simulation could also || 124 Bergengruen, “Moosbruggers Welt”, 338–339. 125 “Um beide Paradoxa zusammenzunehmen: Es ist nicht auszuschließen, dass ein Mensch, der sich der Simulation schizophrener Halluzinationen bezichtigt, gerade mit dieser Aussage seiner größten schizophrenen Halluzination Ausdruck verleiht.” Bergengruen, “Moosbruggers Welt”, 339.

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be so accurate that he is actually hallucinating. This simulated delusion which is actually hallucinated, is not considered by Moosbrugger as a delusion per se because he knows that he is simulating a hallucination and he can use this attribute to hallucinate, or to simulate an actual hallucination and in this way have one foot in reality and the other in a delusional world. This little experiment should demonstrate the contrivances that lying, simulating, and hallucinating in the same context can generate. These possibilities are opened by the novel’s definition of hallucinations as the expression of an attribute, a definition that is reminiscent of the dire situation of Segismundo in La vida es sueño (1635) by Calderón de la Barca. If one can speak indistinctly of hallucinations in the case of both Moosbrugger and Segismundo, this attribute refers to a neutral capacity of perceiving the world. As depicted by Segismundo’s “dreams”, the truth value of perceptions can become irrelevant to the reasons for action. For Segismundo, his acts may be false because they affect only the dream world, but he can still decide to act absurdly or reasonably. Inebriation, sleep, and somnambulism are part of the logical problem of akrasia. For instance, in his interpretation of Aristoteles’ akrasia, R. Robinson explains that to understand this concept, one should distinguish between having knowledge and using it. Thanks to this difference one can know and not know at the same time that an act is wrong. An important variation is the man who sleeps: he ‘both possesses and does not possess it in a way’. Aristotle adds that such is the condition not merely of the sleeping but also of the mad and the drunk and the acratic. He assimilates akrasia to medical cases. (His ethics has a tendency to turn into medicine.) The acratic can even utter the words which express the knowledge and yet not be using it.126

Regarding intentional actions, Anscombe discusses a similar case that parallels Segismundo’s train of thought. She argues that if one was somnambulistic and actually unconscious, one should not be held accountable since some intentional actions like offending are described with verbs bounded to intention, except for cases where the agent knew but wasn’t using his knowledge.127 However, the assumptions about the relation between body, mind, and world are slightly different in Moosbrugger’s case. To posit hallucinations as intentional actions triggered when somebody uses an attribute with the power to endow the world with meaning, has as a

|| 126 Richard Robinson, “Aristotle on Akrasia”, in Aristoteles. Metaphysik, ed. Otfried Höffe (Berlin: Akademie, 2006), 190. Nussbaum offers a similar reading on Aristotle’s akrasia in Nussbaum, Love’s Knwoledge, 80–81. 127 Anscombe, Intention, 85.

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consequence the dissociation of truth from an ethical judgement. A false worldview could be ethically desirable, and this encourages us to inquire after the false but commendable motives of a delinquent – perhaps such are the ethics that Ulrich and his sister, Agathe, pursue in the third part of the novel (Verbrecher) through the mystical experience. In the present context, however, the crucial point is that the ethical inquiry no longer concerns itself with a matter-offact mode of narration and can set aside any factual constraints. Mental life is foregrounded, so ideas or opinions that are neither false nor true serve in all cases as motives for an action. Mental life cannot be subsumed under the tertium non datur because its contents may be false but lead to an action. Hence, to approach the individual’s mental life, one should adopt a position similar to Lucian of Samosata and explore the impact and relevance of ideas which are all truly fictional, ideas or opinions that nourish an account reveling in an exuberant tradition.128 The truth-value implied by such a method is akin to Tristram’s reflections upon the certainty of an autobiographical account, a certainty which stands between Cartesianism and positivism and encourages us to take understanding as a means of apprehending an individual. Although by implementing this method Christian Moosbrugger could be redeemed, his salvation is impossible, because he belongs to a past framework. He represents a borderline case that announces the dawn of a new era. 1.3.1.6 Deliberation in univocal and plurivocal worlds The society set to judge Moosbrugger is in transition, or perhaps in a crisis that dices with multi-perspectivism. Moosbrugger’s struggle is directed against the past world order, which refuses to acknowledge diverse perspectives and their way of endowing the world with meaning. Overly simplified, such a conflict between a univocal und plurivocal world is latent in the unsolvable argument that ensues when two people persist in their opinion and say repeatedly: “Mir erschien sie nicht so!” (MoE 118) Moosbrugger’s cause is fundamentally doomed for one simple reason: he must deal with a univocal world whose narrowness excludes any extraneous perspectives, and face Walter Shandy’s worst fear. Despite all his good reasons and rhetorical prowess, Tristram’s father is certain that the blame for any accident or inconvenience in his son’s birth will be pinned on him, all because: “He knew the world judged by events, and would add to his afflictions in such a misfortune, by

|| 128 Lukian, “Wahren Geschichte”, in Werke in drei Bänden, vol. 2., trans. Christoph Martin Wieland, (Berlin/Weimar: Aufbau, 1974), 301–303.

70 | Rational Irrationality loading him with the whole blame of it.” (I, xviii, 52) As evinced by Moosbrugger’s case, to rely only on facts means that actions are paired by deliberation with an intention, but only when deliberation is carried out by individuals that share a common ground and can make their claims plausible. This common ground is the univocal world, in the sense of a symbolic order. However, for the Kakanian society – despite their best intentions – abiding by this type of deliberation has become, as Sterne would put it, morally impracticable. In Chapter 58, just before the novel delves into the many aspects of the Moosbrugger complex thoroughly quoted here, Ulrich is having a conversation with Graf Leinsdorf that connects the unofficial organization called the the Parallel Campaign to the Moosbrugger complex. Sanctioned by the government, this patriotic organization, which is simply a bourgeois salon, has gathered Kakania’s intelligentsia and tasked them with coming up with the greatest Idea of their times. This Idea should serve to unite the citizens of their multicultural empire and show to the international community the cultural and political relevance of Kakania. If all the savants were able to find such an idea, it would certainly be put it into practice. However, Ulrich realizes that the biggest obstacle is that in their society, different specialists, no matter which discipline they belong to, are unhappy and always pin the blame on someone else: for the surgeons’ expectations, scientific research falls short; scientists cannot find inspiration in the theater nor in novels; poets blame a society that does not believe in anything; painters complain both about philosophy and contemporary poetry; in short, “die Reihenfolge, in der das einer auf den anderen schiebt, ist natürlich nicht immer die gleiche, aber jedesmal hat es etwas vom Schwarzen Peter, […] “ (MoE 233) In other words, experts employ the same tactic Moosbrugger supposedly takes advantage of for his defense. Kakania’s high culture representatives behave like the mad delinquent/redeemer. In both cases, the loss of a unifying point of view is the culprit, or at least that is the conclusion the conservative Graf Leinsdorf reaches: Auch wäre es nahegelegen, die Zeiten des absoluten Zentralismus zu preisen, wo die Welt noch von verantwortungsbewußten Personen nach einheitlichen Gesichtspunkten geleitet worden ist. Aber mit einemmal war ihm, während er noch nach Worten suchte, eingefallen, daß er wirklich unangenehm überrascht sein würde, wenn er eines Morgens ohne warmes Bad und Eisenbahn aufwachen müßte und statt der Morgenblätter bloß ein kaiserlicher Ausrufer durch die Straßen ritte. (MoE 233–234)

The diagnosis is clear. The world order lost its transparency and, in spite of Graf Leinsdorf’s longing for the old days, to even think about traveling back in time to recover the long-gone stability and guiding principles seems ridiculously

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uncomfortable. Yet, modern day conveniences do not assuage the pervasive modern malady, a general unrest whose pathogen cannot be identified and whose cause seems to be the lack of a cohesive framework: “ein jeder Mensch [ist] im besonderen und mit sich gerade noch zufrieden […], aber im allgemeinen ist ihm aus irgend einem universalen Grund in seiner Haut nicht wohl, und es scheint, daß die Parallelaktion dazu bestimmt ist, das an den Tag zu bringen.” (MoE 233) The discrepancy between the particular and the general represents a great contradiction in a positivist society guided by inductive thinking. Deliberation – the Parallel Campaign’s core concept and an enterprise that promises a common ground – is thus depicted as an intersubjective process that has lost its regulating function due to the continuous specialization of knowledge and a universal je ne sais quoi. This bygone consistency between particulars and a general order affects the deliberative process around the Moosbrugger case. It also influences how his appearance is judged. The first impression he evokes is of a kind soul: “gutmütige Kraft und der Wille zum Rechten sprachen aus seinem Gesicht” (MoE 67). His countenance does not betray the cruelty of the murder, an inconsistency that discomfits the specialists: “Sie fanden von solchen Schrecknissen den Weg zu Moosbruggers gutmütigem Gesicht nicht zurück, obgleich sie selbst gutmütige Menschen waren und trotzdem das Geschehene sachlich, fachkundig und sichtlich in atemloser Spannung beschrieben.” (MoE 68) Although they are face-to-face with a Murderer, they are in doubt. A secret longing for a homogeneous world moves them to expect consistency between acts, appearance, and inner life. They want to discover wickedness in his mien, but since they cannot, they dispatch the problem into a delusional world for the sake of their worldview: “es sah so aus, als sträubten sie sich vorläufig noch, auf den Bösewicht zu verzichten und das Geschehnis aus der eigenen Welt in die der Kranken zu entlassen“ (MoE 68). The contradiction here is that the specialists believe that the murder originated in Moosbrugger’s delusional world because in their own world there is no place for such horrors, and yet, they fail to see that, for them, cruelty is permitted or even encouraged within certain ideal domains. For instance, an objective reconstruction of the facts is not considered as cruelty. It even provokes excitement in those same generous people that condemn such actions: “sie hatten ihren Abscheu davor ausgedrückt, aber sie hörten nicht auf, bevor sie fünfunddreißig Stiche im Bauch gezählt und die fast vom Nabel bis zum Kreuzbein reichende Schnittwunde erklärt hatten, die sich in einer Unzahl kleinerer den Rücken hinauf fortsetzte, während der Hals Würgspuren trug.” (MoE 68) Of course, there is a fundamental difference between an act of cruelty and an intellectual interest, but experts excited and gloating over violence hints at the possibility that, for

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someone delusional like Moosbrugger, the murder responds to another set of rules, in which, like in forensic medicine, enjoying violence and cruelty is permissible. To help build a case the experts are meant to describe the events in a matter-of-fact manner but regardless of its sordidness this might prove an exhilarating endeavor. This contradiction reveals rationality’s interstices, how certain thoughts might be condemnable in some contexts but not in others. The set of rules and principles that ground society’s interactions are presupposed as natural and never questioned. This is the unified perspective or framework from which to assess Moosbrugger’s accountability and to acknowledge him as a subject on the basis of the plausibility of his reasons and motives. Furthermore, for the univocal perspective, an act in itself can be condemnable. The novel’s jurisprudence states that guilt lies in the understanding and will. “Zweitens fordert es eine geordnete Rechtspflege, dass jede schuldige Handlung bestraft wird, wenn sie mit Wissen und Willen vollendet wurde.” (MoE 244) This requires of any citizen to be able to recognize the illegal character of an act and have the will to resist it: “es hätte bloß einer besonderen Anspannung der Intelligenz und Willenskraft bedurft, um den verbrecherischen Charakter der Tat zu erkennen und den verbrecherischen Antrieben zu widerstehen” (MoE 244). Although an action can be characteristically criminal or, in other words, condemnable in itself, guilt does not extend to someone who is totally delusional. Accountability falls only upon those within the boundaries of rationality, all citizens “mit Ausnahme jener ganz unglücklichen, welche die Zunge herausstrecken, wenn man sie fragt, wie viel sieben mal sieben ist, oder ‘Ich’ sagen, wenn sie den Namen Sr. Kaiser- und Königlichen Majestät angeben sollen” (MoE 244). These examples represent the two tests that Moosbrugger was submitted to, and while they reinforce the privileged position of mathematics in the novel’s truth regime, they reveal at the same time that, for instance, the language test is linked to a political state of affairs. The order of the world revolves around the name of his majesty which functions as a cohesive force, a name that represents the univocal world accessible to all its subjects. By linking rationality to a political issue and positing a name as the convergence point, the novel establishes the homogeneity and scope of the unified point of view. Furthermore, the emperor’s figure is related to Graf Leinsdorf’s praise of absolute centralism, which shows that, in this context, the discussion about the Parallel Campaign functions as a preamble to the Moosbrugger complex. These thematic interrelations reveal the nuances of Musil’s composition and reflections, of a narrative discourse that examines an issue from various perspectives or, in other words, of what scholars call Essayismus, a textual device which will be discussed at the end of the second part of this investigation.

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While the univocal world refers to an order accessible to a majority that acts in accordance with a central perspective – a way of perceiving serving as a common denominator – , its counterpart is the plurivocal world. Multiple perspectives form this kind of world and its existence is grounded in the individual’s ability to endow the world with meaning and establish a state of affairs. Moosbrugger represents an extreme of this ability. He embodies a microcosm analogous to the society which judges him and feels a titanic responsibility for the world: “Gewöhnlich wendete er eben seine ganze Riesenkraft an, um die Welt zusammenzuhalten” (MoE 240). This world not only rests on Moosbrugger’s shoulders, even its fabric is in his hands.129 He can manipulate objects through words, which leads him to the conclusion that world and things are one and the same: “Nach Moosbruggers Erfahrung und Überzeugung konnte man kein Ding für sich herausgreifen, weil eins am anderen hing.” (MoE 240) This ability allows us to add another layer to the intertextual discussion that makes up the Moosbrugger complex. His Wahn oscillates between Erasmian folly and clinical schizophrenia. According to Grassi’s Heideggerian reading, Erasmus “affirms that moria is the deeper root of the unveiling of all beings and, by its undeductibility and nonrationality, an abysmal folly which has nothing to do with a subjective insanity. Through its power the world appears.”130 Conversely, Insanity as schizophrenia is considered as the loss of vital contact with the reality that constitutes one’s proper surroundings or environment, while other mental faculties, such as memory and intelligence, are neither changed or lost. […] What is here called the environment does not indicate an “external” space, objectively existing in itself, to which “inner life” is added. Rather, there is a very close relation between the subject and its environment: the two interact, […]. Folly as insanity, as a sickness, means that the individual moves exclusively in the circle of his subjectivity, and it is exactly this of which the “unearthly consists, because man does not find himself any longer within the horizon which comprehends Beings as his original “home.”131

These two variations of insanity parallel the discussion around diminished responsibility and reveal a connection to humanist thought. Moosbrugger’s folly, similarly to the Erasmian one, originates in an imagination that establishes a state of affairs and transforms actions into something necessary.132 Imagination

|| 129 Lönker, “Der Fall Moosbrugger”, 291. Lönker speaks of an “ordnungstiftende Sprache.” 130 Ernesto Grassi, Maristella Lorch, Folly and Insanity in Renaissance Literature (Binghamton/New York: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1984), 43. 131 Grassi, Lorch, Folly and Insanity in Renaissance Literature, 45–46, 48. 132 “Die Welt als die Bühne der allgemeinen Torheit, die Torheit als das unentbehrliche Element, das Leben und Gesellschaft ermöglicht, und dies alles der Stultitia in den Mund gelegt,

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gives rise to a manner of rendering the world intelligible and for Moosbrugger this feature can make an action unavoidable: “Es gibt solche Gedanken, die wie Bindfaden sind und sich in endlosen Schlingen um Arme und Beine legen.” (MoE 74) Moosbrugger’s imagination creates the motives; the intentions behind all his movements respond to his delusional state of affairs. This means that we could consider delusions and common sense as equivalent. In both cases, they are part of a univocal world, the difference being that for Moosbrugger there is only one inhabitant in his world, while for Graf Leindsdorf there is a community subjected to a symbolic order. In both cases, rationality as consistency between decisions and actions can be assessed, actions can be coupled with mental phenomena, but within two different rationales. Rationality, the Moosbrugger complex, Ulrich’s search for consistency between the sense of an action and the action factually described are all interrelated and pave the way to the mystical experience as a solution. By means of this experience, Ulrich endeavors to attain a univocal world where actions are rather natural events. In this world, there is no room for irrationality because the inconsistency between action and decision has dissipated, and so has their categorical difference. There is only unity, even for two individuals like Ulrich and his sister Agathe, whose separated minds can never go exactly through the same experience withouth a mystical merging.133 Although the mystical experience entails a solution to irrationality, this project steers towards the moral character as a matrix, symbolic form, or living

|| der Torheit selbst, der wahren Gegenspielerin der Minerva, die in einer Lobrede auf ihre eigene Macht und Nützlichkeit sich selbst priest.” Johan Huizinga, Erasmus, trans. by Werner Kaegi (Basel: Schwabe, 1951 [1924]), 79. Robert Klein discusses imagination in similar terms in his essays from La forme et l’intelligible, ed. André Chastel (Paris: Gallimard, 1970). Furthermore, Kathy Eden argues that in the Aristotelian tradition a similar interpretation of imagination, or more precisely fantasy, is linked to the construction of a case. The reconstruction of events develops a vivid image before the audience’s eyes. Such construction is fueled by fantasy which encompasses, choice, deliberation, and desire, and appeals to perception and judgment. Phantasy is flexible at this stage, but with De Anima Aristotle started developing his idea of common sense as a unifying sense (Eden, Poetic and Legal Fiction, 73–79). 133 “Der entscheidende Punkt ist aber, daß in der darauffolgenden Gewalttat offenbar alle Fragwürdigkeiten aufgehoben sind, die Ulrich für die Moderne konstatierte. Was in ihr erfahren wird, ist eine Übereinstimmung von Handlungssinn und Tat, die gerade nicht mehr vom bloßen Kulissencharakter der Werte relativiert wird. Es gibt keinen Sinnhorizont mehr, der durch die Tat nur seine jeweilige Realisierung erfährt, sondern die Tat wird unmittelbar als sinnhaft erlebt, weil sie Sinn generiert. Zugleich stellt sich eine Einheit mit sich ein, in der alle Widersprüche aufgehoben sind.” Lönker, “Der Fall Moosbrugger”, 299. See also Ingrid Berger, Musil mit Luhman. Kontingenz — Roman — System (München: Fink, 2004), 128–129.

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generalization that may not give an absolute solution to irrationality, but it does provide an alternative answer. Whether dealing with an indidividual or with an intersubjective state of affairs, the problem is linked to the judicial situation of address and to the idea of a self-defining and self-asserting “I”, or “Us”. Both posit principles that render the world intelligible. If one were to blindly assess rationality according to self-imposed principles, this could be labelled “moral narcissism.”134 The architectured state of affairs or, in other words, the common ground needed by intersubjective relations, appears under this light as a cultural narcissism of self-asserting principles. This is an order that forgets its possible origins in folly, a situation befitting Deleuze’s critique of the image of thought. These reflections on Cartesianism and the Kantian concept of Anschauung might offer a panorama comparable to the problematic in the Moosbrugger complex. Deleuze’s thoughts on schizophrenia are the best point of departure to address these similarities: Il ne s’agit pas d’opposer à l’image de la pensée une autre image, empruntée par exemple à la schizophrénie. Mais plutôt de rappeler que la schizophrénie n’est pas seulement un faut humain, qu’elle est une possibilité de la pensée, qui ne se révèle à ce titre que dans l’abolition de l’image. Car il est remarquable que l’image dogmatique, de son côté, ne reconnaisse que l’erreur comme mésaventure de la pensée, et réduise tout à la figure de l’erreur.135

Graf Leinsdorf’s univocal world with the Emperor at its head, and Moosbrugger’s hipostatized perspective offer analogous images. The constraints and logical consequences that any of these perspectives might entail could be enthroned and treated as rationality’s measure, universalized in the sense that: “L’image de la pensée n’est que la figure sous laquelle on universalise la doxa lorsqu’on fait seulement abstraction de son contenu empirique, tout en gardant l’usage des facultés qui lui correspond, et qui retient implicitement l’essentiel du contenu.”136 What Deleuze named an image of thought has its origins in various assumptions

|| 134 I came to this idea by interpreting Butler’s following reflections: “If the human in the early existentialist formulation is defined as self-defining and self-asserting, then self-restraint effectively deconstitutes the human. Self-assertion is, for Adorno, linked to a principle of self-preservation that, like Levinas, he questions as an ultimate moral value. After all, if self-assertion becomes the assertion of the self at the expense of any consideration of the world, of consequence, and, indeed, of others, then it feeds a ‘‘moral narcissism’’ whose pleasure resides in its ability to transcend the concrete world that conditions its actions and is affected by them.” Butler: Giving an Account of Oneself, 105. 135 Gilles Deleuze, Différence et répétition (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1968), 192. 136 Deleuze, Différence et répétition, 176.

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about what it means to think. In Descartes philosophy, the concepts of “I”, “to think”, and “to be” do not need a definition, they presuppose a “natural thought,” a “pensée naturelle, qui permet à la philosophie de se donner l’air de commencer, et de commencer sans présupposés.”137 This natural thinking is grounded in a common sense related to a right/straight/linear way of thinking, providing a principle by which to compare our thoughts with the world. It also implies a perception in which many different faculties work consistently to render the world by means of a passive synthesis that consitutes an Urdoxa.138 By analyzing these assumptions, Deleuze concludes that one should distinguish between two different sets of propositions. On the one hand, these assumptions express the ideal framework that made the proposition possible; on the other hand, they designate objects to which one can apply an expression. The former falls within the domain of sense, while the latter within that of truth.139 Sense cannot be false, since it pertains to a different domain, to the ideal principles that enable one to identify true or false statements. Instead, it is opposed to nonsense or the absurd. From this point of view, Moosbrugger’s stance and the judicial situation of address are irreconcilable, since they cannot assess one another within their framework. For the judge and prosecution, the question is whether Moosbrugger is insane or not. It is a designation or, more precisely, an attribution of insanity that can be true or false. This attribution overlooks the allegorical dimensions of Moosbrugger’s case and disregards the clash between two different symbolic fields, two ways of rendering the world intelligible, and two different sets of principles that make propositions possible. To reach a solution or a sentence would be possible if the discussion was not – as it is – about the principles on which Moosbrugger’s case is built.140

|| 137 Deleuze, Différence et répétition, 170. 138 Deleuze, Différence et répétition, 169–171, 174, 179, 180. 139 Deleuze, Différence et répétition, 199. 140 “il faut au contraire porter cette découverte au niveau transcendantal, et considérer les problèmes, non pas comme des ‘données’ (data), mais comme des ‘objectités’ idéelles qui ont leur suffisance, qui impliquent des actes constituants et investissants dans leurs champs symboliques.” (Deleuze, Différence et répétition, 206) For Deleuze these principles are forms in an Aristotelian sense: “L’illusion naturelle (celle qui consiste à décalquer les problèmes sur les propositions) se prolonge, en effet, dans une illusion philosophique. On reconnaît l’exigence critique, on s’efforce de porter l’épreuve du vrai et du faux jusque dans les problèmes ; mais on maintient que la vérité d’un problème réside seulement dans sa possibilité de recevoir une solution. La figure nouvelle de l’illusion, son caractère technique, vient cette fois de ce que l’on modèle la forme des problèmes sur la forme de possibilité des propositions. Tel est déjà le cas chez Aristote […]. Tandis que l’Analytique nous donne le moyen de résoudre un problème déjà donné, ou de

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The Moosgrugger complex reveals two kinds of autobiographical accounts that respond to different sets of principles. First, there is the story demanded by the judicial situation of address. This account should describe the relationship between decisions and actions in order to assess guilt. Secondly, the discussion shifts the focus slowly towards the question of the development of moral character or personality. However, when the judicial situation of address is confronted with a story that resorts to moral character, it threatens it with contempt and discards it as a mere attempt to avoid justice by providing justifications for acts and placing blame elsewhere. This situation revolves around self-assertion and the quarrel is about being right, about imposing one’s own principles to produce a sentence. Self-assertion’s drive is to extend the domains of one image of thought. It is irrelevant if these images are produced by individual principles or by intersubjective deliberation. The images of thought reveal a manner of endowing the world with meaning, and their confrontation leads to a dead end, to the futile disputes of the Parallel Campaign or of the jurists: “Und so bildete schließlich hier auch noch die sorgsam umgangene Frage, ob man jeden Menschen für sittlich frei ansehen dürfe, mit einem Wort die gute alte Frage der Willensfreiheit ein perspektivisches Zentrum aller Meinungsverschiedenheiten, obgleich sie außerhalb ihrer Erörterung lag” (MoE 536). The scholarly discussion cannot find a common ground because it is entangled with different positions about accountability and punishment. Should the punishment be directed towards persuading someone morally free of the wickedness of his deeds? Should the punishment create aversion to some actions that a personality could not avoid or consider evil? The reconstruction of a moral character cannot give a solution to this, but it circumvents the issue by changing the situation of address, by shifting the focus from judging to understanding. In this way, it offers a different method of apprehending the other, a method that explores the link between biographical account, endowment of meaning and giving reasons for actions that become motives. This approach to an individual may not be useful for a trial’s purposes but it nevertheless provides an option that surpasses any suspicion of elaborate justifications and avoids a duel between two stubborn perspectives. Such controversies respond to a framework that has self-assertion at its center and have become an “ideologisches Gespenst” (MoE 45), remnants conflicting with the historical experience of the last subjects of the Austro-Hungarian empire.

|| répondre une question, la Dialectique doit montrer comment on pose légitimement la question.” Deleuze, Différence et répétition, 207.

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1.3.2 Eigenschaftslosigkeit or how attributes held the world in one piece In the past world, the ethical concern was with accepting multiple perspectives or condemning the solipsistic character of people like Tristram – harmless, yet good for nothing but justifying himself – or Moosbrugger – the murderer without credible reasons. This concern, however, has become irrelevant in Ulrich’s world. In the age of exact sciences, these assumptions are part of an “ideological phantasm.” Now the condemnable character of an act does not hinge on any perspective. Attributes stop being woven into the fabric of a homogeneous state of affairs, which means that if a judge’s openness and newfound interest in mental life undermines the common ground of the deliberation, as well as the role of actions as evidence towards building a case, the last nail in the coffin is the motif of Eigenschaftslosigkeit. Attributelessness disassociates actions definitively from any moral meaning. This claim can be supported by an analysis of some fragments from chapter 13, where the emperor provides the symbolic context. The aged Franz Joseph, the old monarch who is expected to lose all his attributes to adapt to changing times and, in this manner, be able to defend impartially the interests of his multifarious subjects,141 embodies the univocal world and its decay. He represents the dominant ideology which impelled Ulrich into the first of his many career pursuits, namely, to spend his youth in the barracks at the service of his majesty and his land. This association between the bygone world and his military exploits came to Ulrich’s mind accidentally, just after he stumbled across a horse of genius in the newspaper and thus realized that becoming a genius is nowadays within reach for any field or practice, or even for a horse – the sacred animal for the cavalry. A horse, that is, the symbol of the military career he abandoned to follow a different path in his quest to become a bedeutender Mann, has beaten him to the goal and achieved genius. But Ulrich is not surprised by his defeat and reflects upon the old homogenous univocal world thusly: Das hat wohl gewiß zeitlich seine Berechtigung, denn es ist noch gar nicht lange her, daß man sich unter einem bewunderungswürdigen männlichen Geist ein Wesen vorgestellt hat, dessen Mut sittlicher Mut, dessen Kraft die Kraft einer Überzeugung, dessen Festigkeit die des Herzens und der Tugend gewesen ist, das Schnelligkeit für etwas Knabenhaftes, Finten

|| 141 Alexander Honold, Die Stadt und der Krieg. Raum- und Zeitkonstruktion in Robert Musils Roman Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (München: Fink, 1995), 160.

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für etwas Unerlaubtes, Beweglichkeit und Schwung für etwas der Würde Zuwiderlaufendes gehalten hat. (MoE 44)

Both mental and physical attributes used to be intertwined with actions and imbued with moral meaning. That is why someone could have never thought of a psychological attribute like courage independently of custom and tradition. Instead one used to say sittlicher Mut, or Kraft einer Überzeugung and link a physical ability to an idea – a powerful idea that fuels actions – without making the interlocutor wonder what inspiring idea one referred to. A homogeneous world bestowed transparency on such phrases, and its community could have recognized which actions belonged to a specific part of the axiological treasury. Whether related to the physical or to the psyche, attributes were paired with certain types of actions. Momentum or impulse, for instance, did not refer to physics but were put into use for something contrary to dignity; speed for something boyish; and feinting – a strategy that we could hardly classify together with force or momentum as defined in physics – for something prohibited. In the homogenous world, attributes, actions, and moral evaluations were not independent from each other; their meaning was permeable, their boundaries were diffuse, and their combinations conveyed a clear image of the world. Firmness, or Festigkeit, meant that somebody was virtuous, had been virtuous until now and would continue to express his virtue with his deeds. In this age, the man of action was worthy of admiration and he was the vessel in which attributes, actions and morality used to converge. Indeed, Ulrich excluded a great number of individuals from his agential picture, but the point is that one could judge him or anybody else based on actions. One could easily see through a deed and recognize intentions. Hence, actions offered a glimpse of a man’s qualities, equating thus an appraisal of actions to a judgment on his person. This admirable individual lived exactly like Tristram and Moosbrugger in the center of his world, but the fundamental difference is that this man’s worldview was shared by his community and his world was, perhaps narcissistically, considered as the world. The key issue here is access to their intentions. A simple account of their observable life would suffice to reveal the nature of their person and acts. Although this narrative account is connected to the Moosbrugger complex, there are still a number of differences regarding their mode of presentation.

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On the one hand, the admirable man of action is also related to the epic,142 to chthonic characters like Moosbrugger who lives not only between worldviews but is an anachronistic figure. From his delusional point of view, his hallucinations are realized, even concretized by imagination in the intelligible plane, so Moosbrugger creates the world by doing and speaking. With his actions, he is not manipulating the world per se because there is no distinction between his actions and the world. Moreover, his chthonic lineage might shed some light on his name’s meaning: perhaps he is the chthonic citizen made of moss, bound to the earth or maybe to Ulrich, since due to Ulrich’s open frame of mind Moosbrugger could be his grotesque moss brother. On the other hand, Ulrich has hardly any claim on an epic founding of a world and does not share the old worldview. He stopped being the cavalry officer worthy of admiration, but maybe he is still the chameleonic human worthy of admiration after whom Pico della Mirandola inquires.143 Ulrich aspires to unveil man, and to discover what is behind this wondrous image, behind all the attributes that shape personality; Ulrich experiments with his own chameleonic life only to extract its shapeshifting power. He does not have great ambitions anymore nor interests in heroic or epoch-changing deeds. The novel’s plot depicts him visiting Diotima’s salons, changing his profession, and following any intellectual interest without being preoccupied or distracted with material matters. His relaxed way of life should enable him to get rid of all the determining aspects that affect him and by means of vivisection he unthreads his way towards selfknowledge. But despite this faint allusion to Pico’s man, there is a decisive distinction between speaking of man and a human. For Ulrich, speaking about his analytic man is also to speak about a world without a center. Ulrich lives in a disarticulated world where different categories might converge occasionally in persons or events. It could be said that someone manipulates the world with his actions, but

|| 142 Before the world became voided of attributes, actions and an epic mode where related. This topic is also discussed in Musil’s Tonka: “Der Herr von Ketten verkörpert nach dem mittelalterlichen Schema des ›Iwein‹ idealtypisch den ritterlichen Mann der Tat, der in der Spannung äventiure-minne steht und über eine Zerreißprobe zur Synthese finden muß. Dagegen ist die TonkaErzählung bei gleichbleibender Konstellation und entsprechendem innerem Vorgang insofern modern, als sie nicht mehr den epischen Helden kennt, von dem es Taten zu berichten gibt: an die Stelle des Tatbereichs ist das Feld der Wissenschaft getreten.” Jochen Schmidt, Ohne Eigenschaften (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1975), 2. 143 Pico della Mirandola, De hominis dignitate. Über die Würde des Menschen, trans. and ed. Gerd von der Gönna (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1997), 5, 11.

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still, all elements are independent from each other, they are functions lacking a gravitational center ordering them with the force of its pull. The idea of attributes as functions is essential in the new world. They free from determinations but are unavoidable if one seeks to leave a mark on the world. The difference between the past and new state of affairs is motivated by a bourgeois society in which the masculinity ideal is in crisis due to the rising intellectual professions144 as well as the resignification of attributes: [D]as Leben mußte sich ein neues Bild der Männlichkeit suchen. Da es sich danach umsah, machte es aber die Entdeckung, daß die Griffe und Listen, die ein erfinderischer Kopf in einem logischen Kalkül anwendet, wirklich nicht sehr verschieden von den Kampfgriffen eines hart geschulten Körpers sind, und es gibt eine allgemeine seelische Kampfkraft, die von Schwierigkeiten und Unwahrscheinlichkeiten kalt und klug gemacht wird […]. (MoE 45)

Conceiving attributes as functions brings about a new state of affairs to which life has to adjust. However, there is an inherent problem with this turn: Sollte man einen großen Geist und einen Boxlandesmeister psychotechnisch analysieren, so würden in der Tat ihre Schlauheit, ihr Mut, ihre Genauigkeit und Kombinatorik sowie die Geschwindigkeit der Reaktionen auf dem Gebiet, das ihnen wichtig ist, wahrscheinlich die gleichen sein, ja sie würden sich in den Tugenden und Fähigkeiten, die ihren besonderen Erfolg ausmachen, voraussichtlich auch von einem berühmten Hürdenpferd nicht unterscheiden, denn man darf nicht unterschätzen, wieviele bedeutende Eigenschaften ins Spiel gesetzt werden, wenn man über eine Hecke springt. Nun haben aber noch dazu ein Pferd und ein Boxmeister vor einem großen Geist voraus, daß sich ihre Leistung und Bedeutung einwandfrei messen läßt und der Beste unter ihnen auch wirklich als der Beste erkannt wird […]. (MoE 45)

In the new world, qualities are detached from objects and individuals, and thanks to this programmatic feature, attributes can be identified in any movement, in any agent, even a horse. Attributes serve both physical and intellectual activities. This flexibility turns attributes into a veil that hides the “I”. One cannot rely on actions to give an account of an identity, and, strictly speaking, a man without qualities is impossible to represent, since any information about a character can imply or serve as a direct adscription of an attribute.145 However, this objection is

|| 144 Anne Fleig, Körperkultur und Moderne. Robert Musils Ästhetik des Sports (Berlin/New York: De Gruyter, 2008), 223–224. 145 “Ein Mann ohne Eigenschaften ist im traditionellen Sinn episch nicht darstellbar. Er kann keine erzählbare Geschichte haben, da jede Aussage über ihn gezwungen wäre, durch die

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only valid for a judgment built upon actions. In the former state of affairs, an individual was construed as constituted by a set of attributes and perhaps a volitional and intellectual core, whose interaction ground the possibility to act and express attributes, intellect, and volition. But in the new world, attributes are hovering functions that lack a concrete foundation and seem to affect intellect. Using them does not mean that they are constitutive elements for an identity or moral character.146 One can employ attributes indistinctly, that is, one can exploit the available attributes to attain any goal whatsoever, a goal whose meaning was never seminal in the attribute. This skepticism regarding the meaning of actions is stated by Arnheim when he reformulates Ulrich’s ideas: “Zum Beispiel, wenn Sie eben den Verzicht auf die Realbedeutung unseres Tuns fordern; auf den ‘vorläufig definitiven’ Charakter unserer Handlungen, wie unser Freund Leinsdorf so entzückend sagt, dessenungeachtet man wirklich nicht ganz darauf verzichten kann!” (MoE 635) While historicity and the multiple – changing – perspectives on the world give reason for Ulrich to believe that the meaning of his actions are in retrospect irretrievable, in the present, actions seem to be carried out without certainty, without knowing whether the goal pursued or its motives are desirable. This uncertainty resembles Erasmian folly and reinforces the novel’s link to humanism.147 In short, Ulrich’s thoughts on the subject are that one must act because it would be practically impossible to renounce actions and giving reasons for these actions. The comparison can be put along these lines: Tristram attempts to write down every single event and circumstance to give an account of himself, Moosbrugger attains unity between action and meaning due to his power. Both

|| Verwendung von Attributen seinen Charakter in einer bestimmten Weise zu fixieren.” Klaus Laermann, Eigenschaftslosigkeit. Reflexionen zu Musils Roman ‘Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften’ (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1970), 1. 146 One example of the possibility to dissect someone while never reaching something that could be called his own is how the police has a system to recognize the citizens in Kakania. “Diese ‘unpersönlichen, allgemeinen Bestandteile’, in die er zerteilt wird, bis ‘nichts mehr übrig bleibt’, können insofern nicht als Eigenschaften bezeichnet werden, als sie von ihm ablesbar sind und wegen ihrer Zugehörigkeit zu einem anonymen Code nichts ihm Eigenes mehr darstellen”. Laermann, Eigenschaftslosigkeit, 3. 147 “Und doch – hier wachsen die Heldentaten, wie sie gar manche gewandte Feder verherrlicht; diese Torheit gründet Staaten, von ihr lebt jede Obrigkeit, lebt die Kirche, leben Feldherren, Räte und Richter – das ganze Treiben der Menschen ist ein Spiel der Torheit.” Erasmus of Rotterdam, Das Lob der Torheit, trans. Alfred Hartmann, ed. Emil Major (Wiesbaden: Panorama, 2003), 54. “Versteht man unter Klugheit die praktische Beherrschung der Dinge, wird dann die Ehre, für klug zu gelten, eher dem Weisen gebühren, der teils aus Scham, teils aus Angst sich an nichts wagt, oder dem Toren, den nichts derartiges stört?” (55)

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appropriate the world, the former by accumulation, the latter by merging with it; conversely, a man without qualities disowns any item surrounding his identity because there is no essential core, only functions where one can dissolve the Self and its autonomy. Ulrich strives for a rationality grounded in an abstract form and in the mechanisms that connect actions and decisions, both of which have become irrelevant.148 The world cannot be explained anymore through causality, but by a net of functions and situations in which attributes can be triggered or used.149 Despite these unsteady foundations, one could still endeavor to construct a judgment with a case built around actions. One should only bear in mind, firstly, that neither the attributes, nor the action, nor in fact the agent are necessarily linked to a specific meaning. The moral compass is lost, but one can still judge, or better yet, one is free to do anything if attributes are available. Hence, in the past, if an attribute was good the end was good, and the man was also good. But in Ulrich’s era, the end one can achieve, or the end-product one could create, are not predefined. Society has reached a point that opens an uncertain panorama for Ulrich: “Es erschien ihm ungewiß, was er mit dieser Kraft zu Ende führen werde; man konnte alles mit ihr machen und nichts, ein Erlöser der Welt werden oder ein Verbrecher.” (MoE 45) From this disarticulation of the world follows a moral relativism where one is free to pursue any kind of end the sense of which rests on the function it is fulfilling within a system.150 A judgment based on action is thus possible in this framework, but it is an impediment if one seeks to give a report on rationality. The physical and mental dimensions have become disjointed and the discrepancy between outer and inner aspects of an identity, that is, between the means to produce an outcome and their result, is in principle || 148 Laermann, Eigenschaftslosigkeit, 6. “Sobald er sich nicht mehr handelnd seiner personalen Substantialität vergewissern kann, sondern erkennen muss, dass er sich durch sein Handeln in ein ihm fremdes Funktionsgeflecht verlieren würde, das eine Vielzahl konkurrierender Ansprüche verkörpert, gerät er in die Gefahr, sich nicht mehr identifizieren zu können.” (7) 149 Laermann, Eigenschaftslosigkeit, 75. 150 “Der moralische Relativismus, der hier beschrieben wird, setzt eine Atomisierung der Elemente des Handelns voraus und versucht, alle Einzelmomente einer Entscheidung völlig wertfrei zu fassen. Weder eine material definierte Handlung noch die Intention des Handelnden, sondern einzig das Ergebnis einer Handlung dient als Grundlage der Bewertung. Aber dies nun auch wieder nicht in dem Sinn, dass es sich vorher angebbaren Normen fügen muss. Vielmehr befindet über Wert oder Unwert der Resultate des Handelns allein die Tatsache, ob und inwieweit sie sich in größeren Zusammenhängen funktionalisieren lassen oder nicht.” Laermann, Eigenschaftslosigkeit, 19. About the focus on the end product: “Alle Handlungen können daher logisch erst nach der Erfolgskontrolle durch ihre Funktionalisierung in Systemen legitimiert werden, nicht aber im Augenblick des Handelns selbst.” Laermann, Eigenschaftslosigkeit, 19.

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inexistent.151 One might be able to adopt a “tentative definitive” answer, but skepticism about the link between these elements reigns in Ulrich’s world. 1.3.2.1 New state of affairs or how to rely on ideas in a positivistic world In the Kakania of the turn of the twentieth century, the positivistic approach that posits an asymmetrical relation between life’s mental and factual facets allows the observable to corner the inner life and leave it at a disadvantage. Although the same attributes are employed in both mental and physical activities, these attributes cannot be measured when they are put into motion to bring about an idea, nor are they reflected in the idea formed in a long cogitation. For instance, being unable to measure the effort put into an activity is a typical annoyance for a mathematician. His calculations can be followed and praised by his peers, but he could never prove to be the best in his field. A boxing champion, on the other hand, could prove it either by letting his jab’s speed and strength to be measured or with a knockout blow. For ideas though, even if one could measure the attributes involved in their concoction, this approach would result inadequate, since in some cases the process is part of the idea. This is the conclusion Ulrich came to after remembering his past scientific pursuits with irony: Was Ulrich angeht, muß man sogar sagen, daß er in dieser Sache seiner Zeit um einige Jahre voraus gewesen ist. Denn gerade in dieser Art, bei der man seinen Rekord um einen Sieg, einen Zentimeter oder ein Kilogramm vermehrt, hatte er die Wissenschaft betrieben. Sein Geist sollte sich als scharf und stark beweisen und hatte die Arbeit der Starken geleistet. Diese Lust an der Kraft des Geistes war eine Erwartung, ein kriegerisches Spiel, eine Art unbestimmten herrischen Anspruches an die Zukunft. (MoE 45)

Like a champion of science, he sought to perform feats that would bring knowledge a step forward. Ulrich might have accomplished the work of the mighty, but endeavored, sadly, to advance in grams and centimeters in a domain in which there is neither weight nor distance. Moreover, there is a discernable bitter aftertaste in his account. Ulrich realizes that he used the force of his mind as if he were playing a war game, and such bellicose language is a remnant from the old world. The mathematician, the boxer, the horse and its cavalry officer share an allgemeine seelische Kampfkraft (MoE 45), a general trait that defines their || 151 Fleig, Körperkultur und Moderne, 222–225. Fleig discusses this discrepancy in relation to Ulrich and the crisis of the masculinity ideal, a crisis also inserted in the problem of the Eigenschaftslosigkeit.

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relation to the future together with their lust for domination. Their different claims over the world still drag on the unquenchable thirst for self-assertion, for the imposition of a world image. But this manner of relating to the world is at odds with the attributeless reality in which a feat is disassociated from an end. Hence, there is something amiss when someone depicts the advancement of ideas as a straight line or a measurable path to which one could contribute a distinct unit. In a world permeated by positivism, there is a penchant for producing knowledge as if science were a race. Ulrich used to be such a scientist and thought that new ideas would break some sort of world record or enlarge the dimensions of knowledge unit by unit. However, the products delivered by scientific research are quite different; they cannot be approached quantitatively. An action offers two independent sides, factual and mental, which, due to their attributelessness, are not related to each other, so that if we were to focus on the sense of an action and not its factual elements the quantitative approach would also lead to an unsuitable appraisal.152 But more important is the fact that ideas do not behave as physical feats. They cannot set a measurable record, nor the precept of a moralist, a judge’s sentence, or a mathematical formula. They cannot contain or give an account of the process and circumstances together with the different attributes put into play when thinking.153 These intellectual products are a reduction of the innumerable digressive possibilities in a train of thought. However, if there were a positivistic method for analyzing mental life, the quantity of energy invested in a mind’s sway would amaze us: Könnte man die Sprünge der Aufmerksamkeit messen, die Leistungen der Augenmuskeln, die Pendelbewegungen der Seele und alle die Anstrengungen, die ein Mensch vollbringen muß, um sich im Fluß einer Straße aufrecht zu halten, es käme vermutlich — so hatte er gedacht und spielend das Unmögliche zu berechnen versucht — eine Größe heraus, mit der verglichen die Kraft, die Atlas braucht, um die Welt zu stemmen, gering ist, und man könnte

|| 152 “Die Nähe zwischen Pferd und Mensch, die durch die Leistungsfähigkeit hergestellt wird, erlaubt es also einerseits, dem Pferd in einer ironischen Wendung das Prädikat ‘genial’ zuzuschreiben. Auf der anderen Seite macht diese Wendung sichtbar, dass ein bloß quantitativer Maßstab die besondere Qualität menschlicher Reflexionen, Eindrücke und Erfahrungen nicht erfassen kann.” Fleig, Körperkultur und Moderne, 250. 153 Renate v. Heydebrand, Die Reflexionen Ulrichs in Robert Musils Roman “Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften” (Münster: Aschendorf, 1966), 16. Musil’s critique on Durchschnitt is discussed in 2.4.1

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ermessen, welche ungeheure Leistung heute schon ein Mensch vollbringt, der gar nichts tut. (MoE 12)

This reflection is the result of Ulrich’s simple experiment – looking out the window – and it is categorical: we can only aspire to gain some data by measuring the eyes’ movement, but the intricacies of a mental process, as simple as looking out a window, walking, or finding one’s way in the busy streets of a big city, are inaccessible. Mental life is a mystery, or a subject of speculations. Mapping facial reactions sets thus the limit of any attempt to measure the Kraft einer Überzeugung, the propelling idea behind those eyes. The contents of the vorläufig definitive meaning of an action cannot be assessed with this method. Despite this disadvantage, mental feats should not be taken lightly, for they can reach epic proportions, and here literature driven by fantasy might offer a suitable tool.154 The reference to Atlas’s myth not only underlines the hyperbolic dimensions of a mental effort invested in doing nothing, it also mirrors Moosbrugger, with an entire world resting on his shoulders: “Gewöhnlich wendete er eben seine Riesenkraft an, um die Welt zusammenzuhalten.” (MoE 241) As Moosbrugger’s case proves, to render the world intelligible is a feat that might have ethical implications, which are hard to approach with scientific methods or by focusing on the factual dimension. Furthermore, by linking the epic mode to the figure of a man orientating himself in an urban scene, this fragment also harks back to the first chapter and acquires thus programmatic nuances, as I will move on to discuss. In her study, Mülder-Bach establishes that the introductory chapter to Musil’s novel posits in a Wittgensteinian manner a world as a case.155 All its motifs and topics posit what is possible. One of the first issues advanced in this caseworld is that of somebody trying to recognize a city, a man in his everyday life who is effortlessly walking down the street. The issue here is: How can I orientate myself? Or how can someone approach the feat of rendering the world intelligible when the factual dimension and the attributeless reality of Kakania impose || 154 In Lucinde, F. Schlegel highlights fantasy’s fertile illusions for life and uses a scene that mixes Tristram’s hyperactive mind thrusted by circumstances and Ulrich’s contemplative way of life: “Den Hain und sein südliches Colorit verdankt meine Vision wahrscheinlich dem großen Blumenhaufen hier neben mir, unter denen sich eine beträchtliche Anzahl von Orangen befindet. Es war Illusion, liebe Freundin, alles Illusion, außer daß ich vorhin am Fenster stand und nichts that, und daß ich jetzt hier sitze und etwas thue, was auch nur wenig mehr oder wohl gar noch etwas weniger als nichts thun ist.” Friedrich Schlegel, Lucinde, ed. Karl K. Polheim (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1999), 13. 155 Inka Mülder-Bach, Robert Musil: Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften: Ein Versuch über den Roman (München: Hanser, 2013), 22–27.

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unassailable constraints? This question motivates the shift towards the character, which starts in a world where actions are condemnable in themselves, passes through a world that bestows a provisionally definitive meaning to actions, and promises a world where the person endows actions with meaning or perhaps personality: “Der Mensch gibt der Tat den Charakter, und nicht umgekehrt geschieht es! Wir trennen Gut und Bös, aber in uns wissen wir, daß sie ein Ganzes sind!” (MoE 734) This characterization through personality is discussed in the third part of this study. In the meantime, there are some considerations upon the positivistic world left to discuss. Apart from allocating mental and factual to incompatible domains and emphasizing the processual character of thoughts to the detriment of end-products, the aforecited fragment deals with a vital aspect that broadens the scope of the programmatic attributelessness.156 Ulrich’s interest in a method for the assessment or measurement of the mental life is related to the crisis between the old and his contemporary worldview, a crisis that touches upon the rise of the bourgeoisie and its intellectual professions. His apologetics for the do-nothings like Tristram, who does not have any remarkable feats to tell and rather tries to seduce the reader with justifications, are also apologetics for a part of society, since: How could we judge citizens whose main occupations are intellectual by solely relying on the observable? Indeed, actions as material to build a case have become obsolete, but what if, nonetheless, one inquires after these citizen’s feats? Und einer der tut? “Man kann zwei Schlüsse daraus ziehen” sagte er sich. Die Muskelleistung eines Bürgers, der ruhig einen Tag lang seines Weges geht, ist bedeutend größer als die eines Athleten, der einmal im Tag ein ungeheures Gewicht stemmt; das ist physiologisch nachgewiesen worden […]. (MoE 12–13)

The first conclusion draws our attention to everyday life, but not to the idle moments in which one catches oneself looking out the window. Instead, in this scene we see once more a citizen walking through the streets, an urban denizen whose epic effort and the energy she or he invests in rendering the world || 156 Regarding this shift and the societal scope in the novel, Fleig argues: “Da aber der Rang des Bedeutenden nicht mehr zu ermitteln ist und das Programm der Eigenschaftslosigkeit seine Stelle eingenommen hat, kann das Geniale nur noch im Gelingen liegen, für das auch das Rennpferd antritt. Dieses Gelingen charakterisiert das Genie der Norm als Genie der Moderne. Es ist durch ein Zusammenspiel von individueller Bedeutung und Durchschnittlichkeit bestimmt, das eines der wesentlichen Motive für Musils Auseinandersetzung mit dem modernen Sport bildet.” Fleig, Körperkultur und Moderne, 266.

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intelligible cannot be assessed. Although they might be inaccessible, at least one can measure and prove that the energy used in these day-to-day walks exceeds, when added up, the muscular performance of a weightlifter, namely, an athlete who has taken Atlas’ role in modern society. In the new era, there are no epochchanging feats and the most wondrous performances are only found in sports, feats that do not carry the world towards its future: [A]lso setzen wohl auch die kleinen Alltagsleistungen in ihrer gesellschaftlichen Summe und durch ihre Eignung für diese Summierung viel mehr Energie in die Welt als die heroischen Taten; ja die heroische Leistung erscheint geradezu winzig, wie ein Sandkorn, das mit ungeheurer Illusion auf einen Berg gelegt wird. (MoE 13)

If Ulrich previously claimed that the energy used by a citizen in his everyday life overshadows that of an athlete, it follows that, on a larger scale but using the same premise, a bourgeois society performs epoch-making feats that exceed the energy involved in the mythical labors of a hero. Atlas or Moosbrugger are no longer holding the world together and keeping it in place, this task is reserved for the shoulders of citizens and their granular illusions. The idea of a hero has become absurd; groundbreaking feats, a chimera. The bourgeois way of life does not lead to such kinds of actions. Furthermore, a vector analysis of all the forces converging in a feat could reveal all the agents involved and expose a hero as somebody who takes credit for an action which she or he was only able to perform because of the circumstances, because of sheer luck. Any kind of heroics only tips the scales of history; a single act is not the only cause, nor should a hero carry all the responsibility or claim all the glory for something that was the product of a long complex process. Therefore, actions cannot be at the center of ethical assessment. All the movements of an individual and all these individuals – whose actions are almost meaningless when analyzed independently – contribute to building a state of affairs out of sand that will fall into the sea, or eventually into a world war. The world and Kakania lack cohesion and the diverse and irreconcilable opinions threaten to tear everything down. Ulrich calls this new panorama a “kollektiven, ameisenhaften Heldentum”, a “rasionalisiertes Heldentum,” (MoE 13) which thwarts any judgment on rationality in the sense of consistency between actions and decisions because there are no specific actions to pair with decisions. One possible solution to the inconsistency, argues Fleig in her study, lies in the control over character, in the sense of personality and consistent behavior. By implementing psycho-techniques – which belong to a research field that studies how physical training can affect our reactions and unconscious experience – one can channel the most simple actions

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and steer the world’s course without having to rely on punctual feats.157 Assuming that the individual traits of a personality endow an act with meaning, this means that the character brought about by sports and psycho-technique can suspend the discrepancy between actions and decisions, between mental and factual life. This suspension is similar to the mystical experience and Moosbrugger’s way of experiencing world and words.158 With psycho-techniques, instrumental reason can tackle the problem of irrationality raised by the new social and positivistic experience of the world and still enable someone to lead a life, though only indirectly, only with a training that impresses an image of the world on the unconscious.159 In a certain sense, this solution to irrationality falls within the scope of the judicial situation of address where accountability resides in a self-asserting image of the world. Behind these attempts to lessen the inconsistencies of an ironical world stands a self-assertion expanding its principles by relying on instrumental reason to design a training and in this manner gain control over the manner one renders the world intelligible.160 In contrast to this position where modernity is overcome with its own means,161 the possibility explored in this study might not be at the center of Musil’s novel, but latent in motif clusters disseminated throughout the novel. The focus on the construction of a moral character as a way to posit an alternative

|| 157 Fleig‘s study shows how “die Geschichte des Sports unmittelbar mit der Durchsetzung technisch-naturwissenschaftlicher Rationalität im Zuge von Industrialisierung und Urbanisierung in Europa verbunden [ist]. Zum gemeinsamen Fluchtpunkt dieser Modernisierungsprozesse wurde der Körper im Sport auf der mechanischen Grundlage von Kraft und Arbeit. Der Sportler erschien als Sinnbild für Muskelkraft, Disziplin und Leistungsbereitschaft, die die industrielle Entwicklung und damit den gesellschaftlichen Fortschritt vorantrieben.” (Fleig, Körperkultur und Moderne, 28) Sport can lead to a specific manner of rendering the world intelligible: “Denn der Körper im modernen Sport ist Objekt wissenschaftlich angeleiteter Kontrolle und ermöglicht gleichzeitig individuelle Erfahrungen, die sich jedem kontrollierenden Zugriff entziehen.” (32) 158 For the consistency between inner and factual life see Fleig, Körperkultur und Moderne, 312– 313. 159 A. Fleig analyzes leading a life as a sociological concept involving health and fulfilling a duty. Fleig, Körperkultur und Moderne, 32. 160 This manner to dissipate inconsistencies is related to the new cult to the body: “Für die Anhänger der Körperkultur war der Körper nicht einfach Mittel zum Zweck, sondern Ansatzpunkt für grundlegende gesellschaftliche Veränderungen. Ihr Ziel bestand in der Bildung einer neuen Persönlichkeit, die auf einer als natürlich verstandenen Einheit von Körper, Geist und Seele basierte.” Fleig, Körperkultur und Moderne, 35. 161 For Fleig, a crucial feature of Musil’s poetics is the attempt to break free from modernity in its own terms and by resorting to modern means. Körperkultur und Moderne, 318. For rationality as control over the character as one of the solutions to irrationality, see 307, 310, 312–313; for the body as a machine and its relation to measurability, see 4.

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situation of address steers away from rationality as control over mind-body relations, and moves towards a concept of rationality related to the certainty attained by a narrative account. The legitimation of a Self is dissolved in a story that underscores the deficiencies and accidents in the development of a critical individual. Instead of establishing a continuity and the outline of a development, this narrative disassembles the unity of a life story and urges the reader to understand and bear in mind the obstacles confronted by following his life and writing. Coming back to Ulrich’s reflections, heroic actions are outdated because one can reveal different agents contributing to one end and enabling a hero. Furthermore, there is grounds to believe that even the little feats that play a crucial role in the world cannot be ascribed to particular agents. For this reason, one cannot say that actions are one’s own. Ideas have become unpersonal – as stated in another passage of the novel which will help to elaborate on Ulrich’s second conclusion. In this scene, Ulrich is tackling the role of the innovator. A scientific discovery might be brought to light by individual traits. Let us say that thanks to his character an assiduous scientist kept on working, reflecting, conversing with his peers, until he stumbled accidentally upon a ground-breaking discovery. However, this pioneer does not feel fulfilled. Despite all his efforts, he suspects that he functioned as a mere receptacle where contemporary ideas converge. He has the feeling that his mental processes, his feats, weren’t decisive for the history of mankind. His thought process is not so fascinating for a higher reason: In anderer Hinsicht wieder vollzieht sich die Lösung einer geistigen Aufgabe nicht viel anders, wie wenn ein Hund, der einen Stock im Maul trägt, durch eine schmale Tür will; er dreht dann den Kopf solange links und rechts, bis der Stock hindurchrutscht, und ganz ähnlich tun wir’s, bloß mit dem Unterschied, daß wir nicht ganz wahllos darauflos versuchen, sondern schon durch Erfahrung ungefähr wissen, wie man es zu machen hat. Und wenn ein kluger Kopf natürlich auch weit mehr Geschick und Erfahrung in den Drehungen hat als ein dummer, so kommt das Durchrutschen doch auch für ihn überraschend, es ist mit einemmal da, und man kann ganz deutlich ein leicht verdutztes Gefühl darüber in sich wahrnehmen, daß sich die Gedanken selbst gemacht haben, statt auf ihren Urheber zu warten. Dieses verdutzte Gefühl nennen viele Leute heutigentags Intuition, nachdem man es früher auch Inspiration genannt hat, und glauben etwas Überpersönliches darin sehen zu müssen; es ist aber nur etwas Unpersönliches, nämlich die Affinität und Zusammengehörigkeit der Sachen selbst, die in einem Kopf zusammentreffen. (MoE 112)

From a broader perspective, ground-breaking discoveries are like a dog’s attempt to go through a door with a stick in its mouth. This dog has all the capabilities necessary to complete such a feat and it is only a matter of time for it to find the right angle or, in the case of the scientist, for the ideas to find an arrangement

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that can serve as a solution. Ideas as something unpersonal that depends on probability is also present in another fragment, in which Ulrich raises the question of whether one can call an idea one’s own: Da waren sie also wirklich vor gar nicht so langer Zeit zwei junge Männer gewesen, — dachte Ulrich, als er wieder allein war — denen die größten Erkenntnisse seltsamerweise nicht nur zuerst und vor allen anderen Menschen einfielen, sondern noch dazu gleichzeitig, denn der eine brauchte nur den Mund zu öffnen, um etwas Neues zu sagen, so machte der andere schon die gleiche ungeheure Entdeckung. Es ist etwas Sonderbares um Jugendfreundschaften; sie sind wie ein Ei, das seine herrliche Vogelzukunft schon im Dotter fühlt […]. (MoE 57)

Although the main function of this fragment is to characterize Walter and Ulrich as doubles by alluding to Castor and Pollux – born from the same egg, one of divine lineage while the other a mere human – , the fragment also contains reflections upon the effects of culture and tradition on society in general. In the case of Ulrich and Walter, it is difficult to ascertain who is of divine origin, since both are rooted in the same milieu, a fact that explains why their discoveries coincide. The only difference between them is maybe that Ulrich isn’t prey to a common prejudice of his times, unlike Walter who: Obgleich er natürlich wie jedermann bereit war, an seine Erfolge als ein persönliches Verdienst zu glauben, hatte ihn doch sein Vorzug, daß er von jedem Glückszufall mit solcher Leichtigkeit emporgehoben wurde, seit je wie ein beängstigendes Mindergewicht beunruhigt, und so oft er seine Tätigkeiten und menschlichen Verbindungen wechselte, geschah es nicht bloß aus Unbeständigkeit, sondern in großen inneren Anfechtungen und von einer Angst gehetzt, er müsse um der Reinheit des inneren Sinnes willen weiterwandern, ehe er dort Boden fasse, wo sich das Trügerische schon andeute. (MoE 51)

Walter considers himself a genius in a world where an act is the product of innate attributes, but in spite of his self-assurance, Walter has, though to a lesser degree than Ulrich, a skeptical curse that makes him distrust his luck. Perhaps he is not really a genius and his success in different disciplines is the result of diverse social forces, the consequence of a societal desire determining the philistine heroics of the new age. This trait becomes evident if we take a closer look at how Ulrich introduced the discussion around attributelessness with an ironic glimpse to his own path through the academic world. Before musing on the bewunderungswürdigen Mensch, Ulrich devotes some words to academics who believe they have a brilliant future ahead and who think: man dürfe seine ganze Kraft der Sache widmen, statt einen großen Teil von ihr auf das äußere Vorwärtskommen zu verwenden; sie vergessen, daß die Leistung des Einzelnen

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gering, das Vorwärtskommen dagegen ein Wunsch aller ist, und vernachlässigen die soziale Pflicht des Strebens, bei der man als ein Streber beginnen muß, damit man in den Jahren des Erfolgs eine Stütze und Strebe abgeben kann, an deren Gunst sich andere emporarbeiten. (MoE 44)

The social force, or, in yet another context, the Kraft that has lifted Walter repeatedly to advantageous positions in the art world is concomitant to the desire that fuels a society of overachievers. Diverse social agents are fulfilling a role that does not depend on individual traits. Humans have become functions162 and it is just a question of time and probability until an event materializes. In the world of seinesgleichen, that is, the world tamed by natural sciences, even historical events are considered products of interconnected circumstances. Consequently, “‘Man kann tun, was man will;’ sagte sich der Mann ohne Eigenschaften achselzuckend ‘es kommt in diesem Gefilz von Kräften nicht im geringsten darauf an!’” (MoE 13) This claim does not mean though that all kinds of actions are justified, nor is it related to ethical judgment, but it establishes the scope of Ulrich’s conclusion regarding a man who acts: The actions of an individual are irrelevant to the events. The force that used to be fueled by a conviction or an ideology has scattered in different directions. It is the multiple force that one dedicates to an activity by putting attributes into action to attain any goal or end that does not have a stable moral meaning. This panorama entails, for Ulrich, an ethical ambiguity and an impasse: “Es erschien ihm ungewiß, was er mit dieser Kraft zu Ende führen werde; man konnte alles mit ihr machen und nichts, ein Erlöser der Welt werden oder ein Verbrecher.” (MoE 45) In this new era, there is freedom to instrumentalize attributes, but the broader social scope posits the futility of actions considered individually. This could even be regarded as an offshoot of Tristram undermining his own accountability, but on a social scale. If an individual’s actions do not influence the outcome because there is a system determining personality, then there is no historical responsibility for the individual.

|| 162 Another version of this idea appears in a conversation in which Ulrich says to Agathe: “Ich mag meiner Zeit etwa um zehn Jahre vorausgewesen sein; aber etwas langsamer und auf anderen Wegen sind andere Leute auch ohne mich dahin gekommen, […]. Es kommt alles ans gleiche Ziel, und es dient alles einer Entwicklung, die undurchsichtig und unfehlbar ist.” (MoE 721–722) Agathe answers: “Früher hat man das den unerforschlichen Ratschlüssen Gottes zugeschrieben” (MoE 722). This conversation reaches a crucial point when statistics are linked to an intimate descision like suicide. There is an average number of suicides per year that makes it foreseeable: “‘Was man heute noch persönliches Schicksal nennt, wird verdrängt von kollektiven und schließlich statistisch erfaßbaren Vorgängen’ wiederholte Ulrich.” (MoE 722)

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In contrast to the univocal world, in the world of attributelessness or seinesgleichen there are no models or cohesive images that could offer a moral compass. The obsession with the measurable factual dimension and instrumental reason makes it difficult to find a point of reference: “schon damals bewegte sich die Zeit so schnell wie ein Reitkamel; und nicht erst heute. Man wußte bloß nicht, wohin. Man konnte auch nicht recht unterscheiden, was oben und unten war, was vor und zurück ging.” (MoE 13)163 However, although an individual can never be sure of having chosen the best course of action, nor that the decision has any importance, since it is not entirely up to him, this state of affairs should not be confused with determinism, which Ulrich refutes by using his potential attributes for a gratuitous act: “Er wandte sich ab wie ein Mensch, der verzichten gelernt hat, ja fast wie ein kranker Mensch, der jede starke Berührung scheut, und als er, sein angrenzendes Ankleidezimmer durchschreitend, an einem Boxball, der dort hing, vorbeikam, gab er diesem einen so schnellen und heftigen Schlag, wie es in Stimmungen der Ergebenheit oder Zuständen der Schwäche nicht gerade üblich ist.” (MoE 13) 1.3.2.2 Self-assertion and rationality in a world of functions Attributes, as well as individuals construed as functions, challenge the idea of an autonomous individual. They also indirectly question deliberation as well as rationality in the sense of consistency between actions and decisions.164 Now, to characterize somebody with attributelesness and to assume that attributes are independent of object and subject are two aspects of the self-assertion that seems to fuel the judicial framework and its rationale. By renouncing attributes one could attempt to defend autonomy from any external determination, but such

|| 163 For Frank, this issue points at one motif: “die Diagnose eines Legitimationsverlustes. Die Totalisierung des Maßstabs rationaler Kontrolle und instrumentellen Handelns führt unmittelbar zu einer Entwertung der handlungsorientierenden Weltbilder und kulturellen Überlieferungen.“ Manfred Frank, “Auf der Suche nach einem Grund. Über den Umschlag von Erkenntniskritik in Mythologie bei Musil”, in Mythos und Moderne. Begriff und Bild einer Rekonstruktion, ed. Karl Heinz Bohrer (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1983), 347. 164 “Aus dieser Definition [von Funktion] folgt, dass eine Rolle nicht an die jeweils in ihr handelnde Person, sondern an eine soziale Position gebunden ist. Personen sind im Rollenvollzug prinzipiell austauschbar. Sie treten lediglich als Träger bestimmter, durch ein vorgegebenes soziales Feld definierter Positionsmerkmale auf, die sie dessen Handlungserwartungen entsprechend in Funktionsleistungen umsetzen. Weil der Rolleninhalt primär nicht von ihnen, sondern vom jeweiligen sozialen Bezugssystem festgelegt wird, lösen die Rollen bestimmte Eigenschaften von den Personen und stellen sie in einen heteronomen gesellschaftlichen Funktionszusammenhang.” Laermann, Eigenschaftslosigkeit, 9.

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purification runs the risk of dissolving the self. The dissolution does not pose a problem for Moosbrugger, psycho-techniques, or the mystical experience in which world and I merge. But in Ulrich’s case this dissective and analitycal drive leads to a progressive emptying that becomes a void of self-affirmation.165 Since a decision singles out an object and, by doing so, employs attributes which represent an external systemic imposition, the only solution for Ulrich is to get rid of any heteronomous influences and try to reach an empty decision.166 Stripped from all its contents down to a consciousness, instead of projecting an image of the world, it disarticulates its own ability to represent. This analytical Self taken to its limits is a silhouette, a form, in the sense of a principle, for rendering or disarticulating the world. This form represents both the gateway to a transcendental and an immanent solution bounded to a personality. For instance, Ulrich’s analytical penchant is a form that assumes programmatic functions which define potential experiences. Like Moosbrugger, every character represents a form that can engulf the whole world. However, a worldview without paragon leads Moosbrugger into solipsism, whereas in Ulrich’s case, to disown any relation to the factual world of attributes entails narcissim and leads to melancholy. The Self can never identify with anything in its search for autonomy.167 Solipsism and melancholy are recurrent motifs and can clarify why Ulrich, Arnheim, and Stumm – scientist, merchant, and soldier respectively – strive to expand their domain and seize everything by explaining the world with their

|| 165 “Eigenschaftslosigkeit ist ein Verhalten, das eine mächtige Faszination besitzt, weil es eine unbedingte und einheitliche Selbstbehauptung gegen die vielgestaltige Zerrissenheit der Außenwelt und des Ichs zu garantieren verspricht. Sich nicht preisgeben zu müssen, nicht festgelegt zu sein, unberührbar zu sein, ist die Sehnsucht der Eigenschaftslosigkeit. […] Doch in der Eigenschaftslosigkeit haben sie [Resignation, Indifferenz und Melancholie] die Autonomie, die sie zu verteidigen glauben, je schon preisgegeben. Denn der Selbsterhaltung, die sie betreiben, fehlt das Selbst. Das Ich entschlägt sich aller Inhalte, und seine Darstellung in den Akten verzweifelter Identitätsbewahrung ist die Darstellung seiner fortschreitenden Entleerung. In der Intensität eines Gefühls, das die Berührung der Objekte flieht, weil es von ihnen vereinnahmt zu werden fürchtet, und das daher immer wieder sich auf sich selbst richtet, erfährt es seine Entleerung als Steigerung des Selbst.” Laermann, Eigenschaftslosigkeit, IX. 166 “In ihr [der Freiheit des Inneren] sind alle Beziehungen zu den Objekten abgestreift, und die so entstandene absolute Bindungslosigkeit stellt sich dar als Voraussetzung der einen Bindung, die gesucht wird, aber nicht gefunden werden kann. Zu finden wäre sie allenfalls in der reinen inhaltleeren Dezision.” Laermann, Eigenschaftslosigkeit, 37. The consequences for actions are clear in this context: “Denn die Handlungen, die es auf seine Umwelt richtet, scheinen nicht die seinen, sondern die der Objekte zu sein.” (37) 167 Laermann, Eigenschaftslosigkeit, 26, 85, 137.

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idiosyncratic language, thereby stumbling on communication problems and colliding against the dead end of melancholic Solipsism.168 The Parallel Campaign alludes to this experience. However, melancholic solipsism does not only affect the general and particular but also the whole and its parts: So ist der Geist der große Jenachdem-Macher, aber er selbst ist nirgends zu fassen, und fast könnte man glauben, daß von seiner Wirkung nichts als Zerfall übrigbleibe. Jeder Fortschritt ist ein Gewinn im Einzelnen und eine Trennung im Ganzen; es ist das ein Zuwachs an Macht, der in einen fortschreitenden Zuwachs an Ohnmacht mündet, und man kann nicht davon lassen. (MoE 154)

After some meditation upon the vanished ethical compass and its connection to the inner life, Ulrich prophesizes that self-assertion will end in impuissance, in a blackout severed from reality’s manifoldness. Here, self-assertion is characterized by a worldview and its articulation in a personal style. All the characters in Musil’s novel use metaphors and similes in a consistent manner. They are only comfortable in a well-defined semantic field that bounds their explanations to a framework. For this reason, they enter a conversation as if it were a ring,169 armed with the bellicose force of their univocal world. Their conversations and the praxis of the Parallel Campaign is grounded in deliberation and liberalism. Yet at the same time this grounding proves to be a chimera, since it is impossible to reach an agreement. All are – perhaps unknowingly – imposing their worldview and looking after their personal interest.170 The struggle ensues when the univocal and plurivocal worlds are approached with self-assertion at the center of the dispute. From this perspective, the novel pictures a struggle between self-asserting particulars and generals.171

|| 168 Laermann, Eigenschaftslosigkeit, 124. “Das Modell einer totalisierenden Induktion, in dem das Einzelne unvermittelt sich als Allgemeines setzt, führt in einen melancholischen Solipsismus.” (129) 169 “Auch seine zahllosen Auseinandersetzungen im Zuge der Parallelaktion tragen häufig den Charakter von Wortgefechten, die er [Ulrich] nach sportlichen Gesichtspunkten bewertet. Literaturgeschichtlich betrachtet vollzieht Musil damit eine doppelte Bewegung, die seine ambivalente Position gegenüber dem modernen Fortschrittsoptimismus erneut deutlich macht: Durch das Boxen rückt Musil seinen Protagonisten eindeutig in den literarischen Diskurs der Neuen Sachlichkeit ein – und nimmt ihn gleichzeitig auch wieder heraus, da Ulrich vor allem verbal in den Ring tritt.” Fleig, Körperkultur und Moderne, 232. 170 Laermann, Eigenschaftslosigkeit, 90, 96. 171 “Jede von ihnen [den Figuren] hat einen ‘irreduziblen Glaubenskern’, aber dieser ist, da er sich aller rationalen Auflösung in der Diskussion entzieht, seiner qualitativen Bestimmtheit nach gleichgültig. Was inhaltlich in ihm fixiert ist, spielt der bloßen Tatsache seiner Fixiertheit

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Due to the inductive thinking no one can be excluded from the general,172 so the question in a univocal world is who should play the part of the general and who the part of the particular. In view of this, the crisis around the Moosbrugger complex can be read as an attempt to defend the old world and its univocity. Moosbrugger must be assessed and assimilated by becoming a particular case; he must not set an exceptional example. On the other hand, the impasse and crisis springs from the problem of finding a general principle where all opinions converge, which paves the way to moral character as a form and prompts us to find out how to include dissimilar views in a unified framework. There are thus two ways to tackle the concept of moral character. Manipulating personality or moral character with psycho-technique has an effect similar to mystical experience.173 The world is dyed and nuanced by a perception whose palette and colors where imposed by a rationale. Moral character, understood as a hypostasized self-assertion, reveals a world and its manipulation by means of training. It guarantees the possibility of leading a life and grounds it not only in what can be “freely” achieved but also in self-sufficient reason.174 The alternative

|| gegenüber keine weitere Rolle. Er ist ein residuales Substrat des Partikularen, das sich dagegen sperrt, am konkreten Allgemeinen der Gesellschaft gemessen zu werden. Diese Selbstbehauptung des Partikularen gegen das Allgemeine macht die Satire der Parallelaktion aus. Denn deren Suche vermittelt beide jeweils nur in der Form, dass das Allgemeine als völlig leer und qualitativ beliebig bestimmbar erscheint, weil es von der entleerten und zufälligen Punktualität des jeweiligen Partikularen als inhaltlich erfüllt ausgegeben wird. […] Das Einzelne setzt sich selbst als Allgemeines, indem es dieses sowohl als auch sich selbst entqualifiziert und zugleich als qualitativ erfüllt behauptet.” Laermann, Eigenschaftslosigkeit, 101–102. 172 Laermann, Eigenschaftslosigkeit, 109. 173 “Die Bilder der Außenwelt sind in der reinen Immanenz der Subjektivität sämtlich deren eigene. Die Affekte schaffen sich die Gegenstände, derer sie bedürfen, um stets erneut sich an ihner zu bestätigen. In ihren subjektiven Ersatzbildungen überlebt die Objektwelt, der das Subjekt sich hatte entziehen wollen. Aber sie überlebt um den Preis einer qualitativen Veränderung im Akt ihrer Wahrnehmung. Sollte diese – als unbedingt identische – der Selbstbehauptung gegen die verstrickenden Mächte der Außenwelt dienen, so wird ihr die Immanenz, auf der sie insistiert, zum Gefängnis.” Laermann, Eigenschaftslosigkeit, 152. 174 “Eigenschaftslosigkeit endlich scheint konstitutiv für die private Lebensführung sowohl wie für die Regelung gesellschaftlicher Probleme, weil sie sich legitimiert als Ergebnis wissenschaftlicher Verfahrensweisen, die das Verhalten der Individuen und die Techniken ihrer kollektiven Daseinsbewältigung determinieren.” Laermann, Eigenschaftslosigkeit, 106. To lead a life is thus not only related to the idea of freedom to act: “Perhaps, beyond expressing the liberal restriction of worth only to what was “freely” achieved by an individual, the general position best expresses the revolutionary aspirations of the bourgeoisie to secular self-sufficiency altogether, expressed not just by an appeal to the supreme authority of reason but now even to the “self-authorizing” character of reason’s authority.” Pippin, The Persistence of Subjectivity, 108.

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is, instead of instrumentalizing the construction of a character to inoculate principles for self-assertion grounded in Reason, to see the figure of moral character as an immanent framework that posits a case to be judged.

1.4 Interim balance: Moosbrugger’s intentions or basic actions To summarize the discussion and elucidate the interrelationship between an image of the world, self-assertion and a judgment on actions, I intend here to outline Moosbrugger’s case by resorting to Anscombe’s definition of intention, and by giving a full declension of Moosbrugger’s actions using the categories that A. Danto proposes. The situation is as follows: The Kantian jurists want to know if Moosbrugger committed a murder. For this to be the case, they must prove that he was acting intentionally, in the sense that his movements were not a random expression of his delusions or belong to a delusional world, but were part of a plan, i.e., of an action. For this purpose, they start speculating and assume that an intention is a present state of mind. Regardless of the outcome – whether an intention is realized or not – this frame of mind is supposedly expressed in the different movements of an agent. The predicament for the jurists is that neither is the factual dimension completely reliable since it does not grant access to another mind, nor are reasons causal explanations, because a reason might seem too farfetched or unrelated to an action. In view of this situation, they must rely on observation. To discover an intention, they provide a description of what Moosbrugger was doing, like washing the blood stains off his hands. For the jurists, actions of this sort represent a murderous intention, but to be certain that Moosbrugger was succeeding, or in other words, washing his hands because it was part of his murderous plan, one must delve into his mind.175 Since it is impossible to gain access to Moosbrugger’s

|| 175 For intention as a “present state of mind” and its outcome, see Anscombe, Intention, 2, 5. For reasons and justifications, see 6. For intentions as mental phenomena, see 9. The relation to the judicial context is stated by Anscombe thusly: “Well, if you want to say at least some true things about a man’s intentions, you will have a strong chance of success if you mention what he actually did or is doing. For whatever else he may intend, or whatever may be his intentions in doing what he does, the greater number of the things which you would say straight off a man did or was doing, will be things he intends. […] I am referring to the sort of things you would say in a law court is you were a witness and were asked what a man was doing when you saw him.” (8) In this case we ascribe intentions and we do not actually say what he is doing because we

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mind, the prosecution must interrogate Moosbrugger. If it was an intentional action, then the culprit must have a reason that justifies it, even if the description entailing his intention never came to be. When the prosecution asks, “why did you do it”, it wants to hear a description of Moosbrugger’s actions under which he seems to know the outcome to be a murder or, at least, hear an account that sheds new light on the scene and shows that this event was, for instance, an accident. The agent ought to know his intention and the future state of affairs he wished to attain. He should know this without having to analyze or observe what he is doing, and he should also be able to give intelligible reasons: “That is to say: the future state of affairs mentioned must be such that we can understand the agent’s thinking it will or may be brought about by the action about which he is being questioned.”176 The kind of reasons we are talking about here have nothing to do with an evaluation of actions as good or bad nor with their end. These reasons are descriptions that shed a certain light on an action and show a desired future and a mental cause.177 Binding an intention to action by advancing one among many descriptions that allows us to discern a specific mental cause is the center of the judicial discussion. Ulrich’s father has an unyielding position grounded in the old worldview. For him, a fundamental description that ought to show the real intentions of Moosbrugger is given and observable, and in this description, mental and physical dimensions are consistent and homogeneous.178 In contrast to this position, Dr. Schwung wants to delve into the mental causes by relying on Moosbrugger’s

|| don’t know if he is succeeding, “That is to say, in a very large number of cases, your selection from the immense variety of true statements about him which you might make would coincide with what he could say he was doing, perhaps even without reflection, certainly without adverting to observation.” (8) 176 Anscombe, Intention, 35. The example that Anscombe advances for unintelligibility attacks the idea that reasons are causal explanations. She depicts a scene from everyday life. I am going upstairs and if someone asks why, I can answer “to get my camera.” Here, there is no causeeffect relation, but it is plausible, until this person says: “‘But your camera is in the cellar’ and I say ‘I know, but I am still going upstairs to get it’ my saying so becomes mysterious; at least, there is a gap to fill up. Perhaps we think of a lift which I can work from the top of the house to bring the camera up from the bottom. But if I say: ‘No, I quite agree, there is no way for a person at the top of the house to get the camera; but still I am going upstairs to get it’ I begin to be unintelligible.” (36) 177 For descriptions of future and knowledge available, see Anscombe, Intention, 11; for intentions as mental causes, see 15–16; for descriptions that place an action in a certain light, see 21. 178 Anscombe, Intention, 29. One cannot speak of intentions independently of their descriptions.

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biography. This way he hopes to find an answer to the question “why did you do it?”179 The dispute behind both positions is: where does an action and its intention begin? Which is their origin? Is it the will and intellect working harmoniously and grounded in a common image of the world? Or is it the volition and intellect which depend on the development of a personality and its fantasy? While the position grounded in harmony has become outdated, if we took the other option and looked backwards to find the mental causes that function as reasons, we would be confronted with a never-ending narrative task. Every fragment from a life becomes a step in a complex plot that necessarily leads to the murder. By giving an intention, in the sense of desired future, as a reason, the previous actions or stages in the plot become explanations of how it happened. If Moosbrugger had answered ‘to get rid of her’ when they asked him ‘why did you do it’, all his previous actions would show how he did it, for example, buying a knife, stabbing her and then washing his hands to get rid of the evidence.180 But descriptions do not contain a hidden true intention to be revealed through careful perusal, just statements to be supported by delving into the Hows. Now, to understand how Moosbrugger acted and grapple with his intentions, it is necessary to speculate on the nature of his actions. A full declension of actions following Danto’s model will help assess where Moosbrugger’s intentions begin. In Danto’s article, there is no mention of intentions or mental causes, but its reflections upon the problem of causality of movements that pertain to a complex action are suitable for the present argumentation.181 Implicitly, Danto analyzes the consistency between actions and decisions,

|| 179 Anscombe, Intention, 23–24. As an answer to this question it is possible to say that somebody explains causes in the sense of describing the concatenation of events in the factual realm, or explains his practical reasoning, or also, as in the case of revenge, he confesses revenge, which is plausible motive, in the sense of culturally accepted reaction, linked to an intention. 180 Anscombe here states that, if there is a broader intention, this can ‘swallow up’ the actions that it entails. Her example are four descriptions of the same action. Moving an arm, operating a pump, replenishing the water supply, and poisoning are all the same action under different descriptions that posit an intention: “Thus when we speak of four intentions, we are speaking of the character of being intentional that belongs to the act in each of the four descriptions; but when we speak of one intention, we are speaking of intention with which; the last term we give in such a series gives the intention with which the act in each of its other descriptions was done, and this intention so to speak swallows up all the preceding intentions with which earlier members of the series were done.” Anscombe, Intention, 46–47. 181 For Danto’s definition of basic action, see footnote 90. Danto’s article tackles the problem that Anscombe illustrated with the story of the man who is poisoning someone by pumping

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which is evident when he tackles laughter. Laughing could even be regarded as the paragon of rationality because it refers to a simultaneous corporeal and mental phenomenon that can be caused to happen. The four declensions are as follows. The first is when I take nitrous oxide or watch a video of stand-up comedy and cause myself to laugh.182 The second declension is related to negligence, to not omitting or controlling oneself, which is Schwung’s position. This position focuses on control and good deeds regardless of our delusions or accurate knowledge of a situation: One should be able to refrain from laughing at a funeral when hearing a funny joke, but will not be able to control himself when a dentist gives him nitrous oxide and causes him fits of laughter. The second case shows thus that accountability can be traced back to the moment I decided to submit myself to nitrous oxide. The third declension is related to sickness and to “laughing without mirth”: maybe our body makes exactly the same contractions that accompany laughter, or we have nervous fits. Here, medical forensics and the rationality test Moosbrugger takes come into play. If he is mentally ill, then he acts without intentions, which does not mean involuntarily. The fourth case corresponds to basic action, which is a power, like moving an arm. Although in some contexts moving an arm is considered an action, like hailing a cab, there are other situations where moving an arm stands to nothing as an effect. Perhaps we consider that there is a mental cause, a nervous impulse, but these mind and body relations do not belong to Danto’s approach where a cause is an action, like taking one of my arms to move the other. In the first three declensions, accountability does not pose a problem. If I took something and caused myself to hallucinate, I am still accountable because I decided to enter a drunken state. In the second case, one could be accountable for negligence, and in the third, a sick person has diminished responsibility. The difficulties start with basic actions. They do not seem to be actions with intentions but elements that allow one to act, so in this case we are not dealing with causality in a strict sense. For instance, to consider laughing as a basic action seems unintelligible, and here exactly is where Moosbrugger’s struggle with justice begins. Basic actions are powers, and there is a given repertoire of them that we utilize to act.183 Now if laughing was a power this would mean that somebody has the capability to switch humor on and off, thereby altering his relation to reality and rendering everything laughable as if one could choose a particular mode of

|| water. The question was how to approach the causality of each movement and identify their intention. See also Anscombe, Intention, 37–40. 182 For the four declensions of laughing see Danto, “Basic Actions”, 141–143. 183 Danto, “Basic Actions”, 144–147.

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perceiving the world. For this reason, endowing the world with meaning means that Moosbrugger is not leading a life, since there is no intention or decision behind his movements. Instead, he is performing basic actions thanks to his power or, more precisely, attribute of hallucinating: “Da er auf alle Worte, die man für ihn verwendete, stets sehr gut aufgepaßt hatte, wußte Moosbrugger, daß man das Halluzinieren nennt, und war einverstanden damit, daß er diese Eigenschaft Halluzinieren vor anderen voraus habe, die es nicht können“ (MoE 239). Moosbrugger’s only action would be to render the world intelligible. Every manipulation of objects or any movement in the world is a basic action emanating from his chthonic power. This power allows him to perform only one action, create his image of the world by doing and perceiving simultaneously and without distinction between the two. This type of action, according to Danto, cannot be explained with causality: If, for instance, we take the description “M images I” where I is a mental image, then it is unclear, as it was in the case of “laughing” or “moves an arm,” whether M has performed an action or not, or, if an action, then a basic action or not. The whole declension works for, C-1: M may cause an image to appear in his mind, perhaps by taking a drug; C-2: Someone or something other than M may cause an image to appear in M's mind; C-3: M is haunted by an image which appears spontaneously, recurrently, and unpredictably as symptom, of perhaps a psychic disorder; and C-4: M simply produces an image, as I and all those with the requisite alpha rhythms are able to do, i.e., as a basic action.184

Moosbrugger’s power surpasses the example stated by Danto because the whole world hangs on his intellect. Since Danto assumes that “the effect of an event is distinct from itself,”185 then when the boundaries between “I” and object dissolve there is no place for causality. Analogously, Moosbrugger does not distinguish between walking towards someplace and the world moving under his feet, so any subsequent actions are subsumed to his hallucinating. In this intellectual feat, it is possible to identify Moosbrugger’s chthonic nature, distant from human and close to god. “Some theologians have spoken as though everything done by God were a basic action. This would prohibit us, of course, from saying that God caused anything to happen (the making of the Universe would be a basic action.) And, for reasons which will soon emerge, this would make the ways of God inscrutable indeed.”186

|| 184 Danto, “Basic Actions”, 148. 185 Danto, “Basic Actions”, 141. 186 Danto, “Basic Actions”, 142.

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A further problem with seeing hallucinating and laughing as powers is, firstly, that they do not correspond to the normal repertoire of basic actions and, secondly, that powers are impossible to explain.187 However, one can indirectly gain some understanding of this type of action by resorting to a biographical account, like Tristram Shandy and the Moosbrugger complex propose. A biographical account or any narration whatsoever can posit causality to some extent. They can render the world intelligible from the perspective of a protagonist, reveal every action as necessity or as caused to be imagined by circumstances like in C3, and, ultimately, establish a modal-regime for past deeds. Weaving actions and events through narrative devices implicitly posits physical laws and a certain understanding of psychological mechanisms. A narration fuses the multiple factors involved in an action and also has a cohesive effect on the explanation of any given event, because the intelligibility created by means of the emplotment produces universal statements about the narrated state of affairs.188 On this first approach, I established that for both novels actions are inadequate as the center of a moral judgment. They shift the focus towards character

|| 187 Danto, “Basic Actions”, 146–148. 188 Ricœur, Temps et récit, 84–86. For Ricœur, intelligibility is achieved through the emplotment, a process that engenders a deep connection between the multiple aspects of an action, and goes beyond linear succession: “L’une après l’autre, c’est la suite épisodique et donc l’invraisemblable; l’une à cause de l’autre, c’est l’enchaînement causal et donc le vraisemblable. Le doute n’est plus permis : la sorte d’universalité que comporte l’intrigue dérive de son ordonnance, laquelle fait sa complétude et sa totalité” (85). By interweaving scenes as comprehensive units, the text attains a homogeneous texture that occults its knots. It posits a knowledge based on universals: “Penser un lien de causalité, même entre des événements singuliers, c’est déjà universaliser.” (85) Universals, as opposed to general knowledge, do not depict or explain the actual state of affairs, they are nourished by imagination and illustrate an ethical project. “Les universaux que l’intrigue engendre ne sont pas de idées platoniciennes. Ce sont des universaux parents de la sagesse pratique, donc de l’éthique et de la politique. L’intrigue engendre de tels universaux, lorsque la structure de l’action repose sur le lien interne à l’action et non sur des accidents externes. […] Composer l’intrigue, c’est déjà faire surgir l’intelligible de l’accidentel, l’universel du singulier, le nécessaire ou le vraisemblable de l’épisodique.” (85) Ricœur adopts universals to distance the narrative ethical knowledge from epistemological constraints and a direct confrontation with Kant’s third Antinomy. His ethic explores rather the practical knowledge related to phronesis. In this context, it is revealing that the role Nussbaum confers to the universal when speaking about practical knowledge: “The general is opposed to the concrete; a general rule not only covers many cases, it applies to them in virtue of some rather non-concrete characteristics. A universal rule, by contrast, applies to all cases that are in the relevant ways similar; but a universal may be highly concrete, citing features that are not very likely to be replicated.” Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge, 67. This stance leads to the monad as the perspective over the world that merges singular and general.

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and develop the questions: Are we accountable or, do we have any responsibility over the manner in which we render the world intelligible? Or, what responsibility do I have in a world where attributes and individuals are functions, where there are circumstances that affect my decisions even before a situation arises in which I am called to decide? What responsibility do I have if reality is metaphorical at its core?189

|| 189 This claim is close to Grill’s main argument: “Structurally Musil’s novel is a cosmos of infinite number of interrelated but separate circles, without center and without circumference. Implicit in its form is an assumption about the ultimate metaphoric nature of reality. Each of these circle worlds is a metaphoric variation on other possible worlds and its created by the temporary conjunction of usually separate elements.” Genese Grill, The World as Metaphor in Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities. Possibility as Reality (New York: Camden House, 2012), 20. The ethical consequence is “And here we might return to the confluence of ethics and aesthetics, for the ability to understand man’s role as “artistically creative subject” and the metaphoric nature of perceptions is the prerequisite for a belief in human agency or the possibility or responsibility to create reality.” (87) In a similar vein, Nübel points out how this issue in MoE is related to the measurability of the world and functions, as well as to the framework postulated by a Kantian Ratio. Birgit Nübel, Robert Musil. Essayismus als Selbstreflexion der Moderne (Berlin/New York: De Gruyter, 2006), 162–163.

2 The Multifarious Life of the Mind 2.1 Mental persona: from narrative program to compositional principles If there is such a thing as a factual persona, it is only in a narrow sense that highlights the insertion of an identity into a domain warranted by the observable, by physics, and casual systems. This means that to talk about actions, birthdays, or death certificates delivers a narrative construction foregrounding one side of a narrative identity, whereas the other side, the mental persona, is constructed through a set of stylistic devices gathered under the umbrella term of psycho-narration. With these stylistic devices, one ascribes – directly or indirectly – mental contents such as thoughts, emotions, attitudes, whose credibility rests on verisimilitude. We can be diligent by building a case and not rushing our judgments, or biased and ascribe attitudes without great consideration. Either way, we draw flimsy conclusions based on observation. Our relation to both domains is asymmetrical. One could even say that the mental is parasitic on the factual, but ascriptions are in any case necessary to circumvent the inaccessibility of other minds and ground our interactions in society. The mental life postulated through ascriptions is hence crucial for our everyday life, but more important for the present interpretation is that such ascriptions are grounded in assumptions about the interrelation between mental and factual personas, assumptions that project a practical field and can be articulated through textual devices. Until now, this study’s efforts have been invested not so much in demarcating the boundaries of the mental and factual domain, but in bringing to light how both novels discuss these assumptions narratively. For this purpose, the factual was the point of departure, but the mental slowly acquired salience. The interpretation built around the narrative agenda in relation to agency showed how the novels problematize the idea of telling a story about a led life and at the same time lay the basis for an approach based on forensic rhetoric and the judicial situation of address. Both theoretical frameworks helped to delineate the purview of the problem. The inner life was first present in the reflections on decisions; then on intentions, motives, rationality; and at the end there was a shift which depicted folly, schizophrenia, and Moosbrugger’s divine basic actions as the center of the discussion. Tristram’s opinions and Moosbrugger’s hallucinations give access to an individual worldview and shed light on their ideal persona. But understanding the mental mechanisms is central, not only due to the interrelationship between

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110656947-003

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an individual way of rendering the world intelligible and an image of the world that self-assertion might impose, but also because this understanding leads to moral character. The novels’ approach to mental life has bearings on the shift from a judicial situation of address to another manner of apprehending the “I”. For this reason, the following discussion should bridge the gap between the problem raised in the first part (I) and the last part (III), which grapples with moral character. The concept of character amalgamates the factual and the mental, but before pursuing this composite picture, it is necessary, for the sake of symmetry, to tackle the ideal facet as depicted in both novels independently. Splitting an individual into two lives relates to what G. Ryle called the “official doctrine.” Cartesian philosophy divided the individual into body and mind, grounding thereby the dogma of the “ghost in the machine.” This division leads to the notion of an ideal side of identity with a status of existence different from the physical but analogously approached. This is a category mistake based on the premise that: “The physical world is a deterministic system, so the mental world must be a deterministic system.”1 Observable phenomena are identifiable in time and space in the outside world, whereas mental happenings are allocated inside the head. Inside and outside were considered as analogous dimensions, so it seems suitable to explain minds by resorting to causation and by discovering the laws of the mind. The problem here though is that while bodily movements are observable, the life of the mind is private. Nobody can be certain that there is mental causation, nor that there are other minds. Even the transactions between mind and body become a theoretical nuisance; they “remain mysterious, since by definition they can belong to neither series.”2 Due to this division, a person has a public autobiography and a private one, an inner history that – remembering Yorick – can give certainty about the true account of our deeds. Our knowledge is warranted by the eye of the mind, which, ideally, would always deliver an accurate image for us to analyze. A third party, on the other hand, must settle for a description that is supposed to show the intentions of an agent. The controversy raised by Tristram’s narrative agenda and Moosbrugger’s case corresponds to the “official doctrine.” Both novels endeavor to construct a description that shows the intentions and responsibility of the perpetrators. However, their attempt to delve into the mental life is thwarted by their punctilious drive: they end up revealing the inconsistencies and inherent irrationality

|| 1 Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (New York: Routledge, 2009), 10. For official doctrine and ghost in the machine, see 1, 5. 2 Ryle, The Concept of Mind, 2.

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in their method. A judgment about rationality, in the sense of consonance between actions and decisions, cannot be attained by the narrative means advanced in the novels. Tristram’s obsessiveness and Moosbrugger’s wild reason do not heed any pragmatic objections and this obstacle materializes when factual life and accountability are foregrounded. The focus on mental life, on the other hand, can be regarded as an intermediate step in a progression which strives to surpass, or perhaps rather bypass, the strict boundaries between the two dimensions. This attempt renounces any claim on truth or a vantage perspective. Only through fiction can one tell the story of an inner life, and by these means endeavor to apprehend the individual based on understanding and empathy. Fiction can make conjectures about the transactions between factual and mental, even dispute their fundamental distinction and merge them in a character; but then again, before discussing this subject, it is necessary to establish what, according to the novels, are the contents, the ideas, feelings or emotions that should appear in a story about an inner life. In Tristram Shandy, the focus on the mind is accompanied by a resignification of the concept of life. Since the life of the mind can only be explored through fiction it would be more adequate to consider this resignification as a compositional principle, as the structuring idea propelling the narration. The approach based on the narrative program and judicial eloquence, which define the case’s parameters, strived to derive the plan or the idea supporting the structure from the text. For “the plan is the architect’s idea, the structure of the building, its realization. The idea-content of a work is its structure. An idea in art is always a model, for it reconstructs an image of reality.”3 If one concedes that inner life is the core of a narrative structure, it follows that it is also a model whose structural principles were chosen and express an attitude, a stance towards reality and its reproduction.4 For this reason, the meaning of “life” in Tristram Shandy and in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften will shed some light on the ethical-aesthetical question of the possibility of telling a story about a led life. “Life” in both novels stands for the active principle, the living principle that governs an organism, or in other words, the principle that regulates the text as a whole, or even as a textual organism. So “the literary scholar who hopes to comprehend an idea independent of the author's system for modeling the universe, independent of the structure of a work of art, resembles an idealist

|| 3 Jurij Lotman, The Structure of the Artistic Text, trans. Gail Lenhoff and Ronald Vroon (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1977), 12. 4 Lotman, The Structure of the Artistic Text, 19.

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scholar who tries to separate life from that concrete biological structure whose very function is life.”5 In narrative terms, the life and opinions promised in the title of Sterne’s novel are, against our common expectations, not a content, but a narrative procedure. By following Tristram’s story, the reader can see how the structure breathes life into the title, namely, a specific life that puts into question our preconceived idea about life in an autobiography.

2.2 Tristram’s redefinition of life Sterne fixes his point of departure for the redefinition of life in the novel’s title. Life is opposed to opinions, and while the latter stands for the factual, the former encompasses all ideas without drawing a distinction between abstruse philosophies, whimsical notions, or inconsequential thoughts. Moreover, for Tristram to depict his life means to convey how events were experienced and how the experience of writing down his own history shapes his account. The purport of these concerns will be clear once we look at the meta-reflections in chapter XIV of the first volume. Although the redefinition advanced there is not a novelty for autobiography and was already present in Montaigne – a crucial influence for Sterne – reducing life to the factual dimension serves the novel’s purposes and puts into perspective the role of the mental dimension.6 As the narrative program corroborates, at the beginning, life refers to a story of the different stages in an individual’s physical development. This story is the organization and selection of meaningful events to which the narrator adds different opinions in an attempt to include all possible information. Here, besides the impossibility of including everything, there is a conflict intrinsic to the autobiographical narration striving to merge the factual and ideal, namely, that it must rely on the events but cannot narrate them without artifice. The autobiographer employs all kinds of textual mechanisms to bring the events under a particular light and articulate the meaning that constitutes Tristram’s life in a broad sense, one that includes all aspects.7 Although artistic license distin-

|| 5 Lotman, The Structure of the Artistic Text, 12. 6 Mathieu-Castellani argues that, for Montaigne, life and its manner should develop in the interstices of history as magistra vitae, see La scène judiciaire de l’autobiographie, 143. 7 “Ce qui distingue du genre ‘purement’ romanesque le roman autobiographique, quels que soient ses avatars et si fragiles que soient ses frontières avec d’autres formes, serait peut-être alors ce difficile compromis entre artifice et naturel, entre le refus de l’ornement et la nécessité de la parure. Ici et là, la fiction, qui ne s’oppose pas à vrai ou véritable, mais a brut ou à sans artifice, feint et fabrique à la fois, conformément à l’étymologie.” Mathieu-Castellani: La scène

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guishes fictional autobiographers from historians and would allow deviations from the truth, Tristram does not consider his project and his job as writer very different to the work of an historian. Both are, for instance, vulnerable to accidents: Upon looking into my mother’s marriage-settlement, in order to satisfy myself and reader in a point necessary to be cleared up, before we could proceed any farther in this history;—I had the good fortune to pop upon the very thing I wanted before I had read a day and a half straight forwards,—it might have taken me up a month;—which shews plainly, that when a man sits down to write a history,—tho’ it be but the history of Jack Hickathrift or Tom Thumb, he knows no more than his heels what lets and confounded hindrances he is to meet with in his way,—or what a dance he may be led, by one excursion or another, before all is over. (I, xiv, 41)

Exactly like an historiographer, Tristram devotes himself to archival research to inquire after his birth. Indeed, he could barely have any remembrance of this event, but it is not exactly his memory that complicates Tristram’s autobiographical endeavor, nor is he looking for hard evidence to set the exact date. The marriage-settlement symbolizes a cultural circumstance that affected his life; it is a practice that engendered a textual vestige to which he can resort in order to understand how a disagreement between his parents, along with a legal dispute, led to the accident that maimed him. Tristram claims to be an historiographer because he reconstructs events. The intention and the materials to which historians and novelists give form might differ, but both belong to the same trade. Both resort to similar strategies and stylistic devices to produce “a verbal structure in the form of a narrative prose discourse.”8 But the crucial point here is that their actual work as writers entails the same practical problems. For Tristram, a writer must read all kinds of texts if he wants to bring his story to an end. In the scene quoted above, he was lucky and found the information quickly, but there will be occasions where he will struggle with another source or an obscure concept whose explanation muddles the narrative structure. Once again, this scene underscores that writing, for Tristram, is the devel-

|| judiciaire, 166. Therefore, if truth is superseded by the careful treatment of the fabric that conveys it and interprets it, it escapes discursive determinations “Lorsque ‘ma vie’ devient ‘le discours de ma vie’, elle échappe à la biologie, à la génétique, à l’histoire, à la sociologie pour produire du sens, et des effets spécifiques.” (168) 8 Hayden White, Metahistory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), IX. The cited fragment is part of White’s introductory definition of the historical work.

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opment of a Doppelgänger. Writing down his life is thus also the story of his writing blockades and the events that are a part of his life as a writer. However, accidents in the archive are not the only calamities in his writing journey: Could a historiographer drive on his history, as a muleteer drives on his mule,—straight forward;----for instance, from Rome all the way to Loretto, without ever once turning his head aside either to the right hand or to the left,—he might venture to foretell you to an hour when he should get to his journey’s end;----but the thing is, morally speaking, impossible: For, if he is a man of the least spirit, he will have fifty deviations from a straight line to make with this or that party as he goes along, which he can no ways avoid. He will have views and prospects to himself perpetually soliciting his eye, which he can no more help standing still to look at than he can fly; […] (I, xiv, 41)

The beginning of this metaphorical reflection confirms that Tristram sees himself as an historian of his own life, as someone reconstructing events from an external perspective. Even though he could resort to his memories, he lacks confidence in the credibility and privileged access to his own mind, although these are not exactly the main objections in this case. His recollections might let him establish the “what”, “when” and “who”, but this is not his goal. Such an account would be a chimera or, “morally speaking, impossible”, since it would represent the case of the muleteer who knows the kilometers in the stretch from Rome to Loreto and could calculate his arrival time, but the result of such a calculation is not the travelling experience that Tristram strives to salvage. In the literary tradition, the road is one of the most productive metaphors for discussing life. So one could fairly say that how “road” is defined within a literary work must have bearings on the relationship that it creates towards reality, since it is a chronotope where “temporal and spatial determinations are inseparable from one another, and always coloured by emotions and values.”9 The road is “both a point of new departure and a place for events to find their denouement,” and it can turn into a course, “the course of life”, where one also has “random encounters.”10 It is the place for chance, but also represents the pilgrimage to god. The muleteer is on a pilgrimage, or at least he might be leading someone to the Basilica of Loreto, where the Holy House that the virgin Mary supposedly inhabited is displayed. This reference allows us to position Sterne’s fictive autobiography close to Augustine’s Confessions and John Bun|| 9 Mikhail Mikhailovic Bakhtin, “Forms of time and of the chronotope in the novel”, in The dialogic imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 243. 10 Bakhtin, “Forms of time and of the chronotope in the novel”, 243–244.

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yan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678). Although Tristram’s project abandons any claims on truth or on the protestant notion of conscience discussed by Yorick,11 he is still concerned with moral issues and takes a different road. With the redefinition of life, he is foregrounding the mental dimension, a variant comparable to the romantic road on which Novalis’ Heinrich von Ofterdingen sets out, “a road that is half-real, half-metaphorical.”12 Tristram’s life is indeed a road,13 but it is that of the labyrinthic mental life, where “nothing can be depended upon but accident […] Sterne deliberately creates an impression that violates many cherished assumptions of order, ratiocination and social intercourse. […], he weaves a complete network of digression, involution and interruption. Thus he subverts the security that most of us seek in conventional patterns of conduct and thought.”14 But this manner of experiencing life is not an anguishing experience. Tristram rejoices in the constraining process entailed in writing down his life-story. Language might not be reliable and “mortality is but a moment in a flux of happenings-remembered, untrustworthy, superficially absurd.”15 And still, Tristram “need not be dismayed by temporal decay; there is too much to be savoured of life in the process of moments and events which—because it has neither beginning nor ending—is perpetually new.”16 Tristram has a palate that fancies the fleeting. He has a predilection for the flavors of the unmeasurable, so his account revolves around unreliable items that might illustrate how he possibly experienced the past, and how in this writing process he is prone to have new ideas. But this discursive nature is not

|| 11 Tristram seeks human certainty in the process of narration, which reminds us of Augustine beginning his Confessions: “Da mihi, domine, scire et intellegere, utrum sit prius invocare te an laudare te et scire te prius sit an invocare te. Sed quis te invocate nesciens te? Aliud enim pro alio potest invocare nesciens. An potius invocaris, ut sciaris?” Augustinus, Confessiones/Bekenntnisse, ed. and trans. Kurt Flasch and Burkhard Mojsisch (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2009), 34. 12 Bakhtin, “Forms of time and of the chronotope in the novel”, 244. 13 The structure of the novel and its elements can be easily explained with this chronotope: “[...] life is seen as a road on which one rides one's hobbyhorse, writing and digressions are like traveling with side trips, a series of events is like a road, a story is landscape and plot a road in it, love is like a carriage, the pleasures of life are like ambling, a life of misfortunes is like a horseback ride,[...] “ Eugene Hnatko, “Tristram Shandy’s Wit”, in The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 65 (1966): 55. 14 Edward Bloom and Lillian Bloom, “This Fragment of Life’: From Process to Mortality”, in Laurence Sterne: Riddles and Mysteries, ed. Valerie Grosvenor Myer (London: Vision, 1984), 62. 15 Bloom et al., “This Fragment of Life’”, 57. 16 Bloom et al., “This Fragment of Life’”, 57.

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arbitrary in all respects. The novel posits Locke’s association of ideas as a mechanism governing the mind. This mechanism represents a regularity that helps us understand the depicted experience of the mental life. Its pivotal function has already been pointed out and thoroughly studied by J. Traugott. For him, “Tristram Shandy uses philosophical snarls for more than a satire on systems; it uses them as a dramatic device displaying human relations.”17 Locke’s formal devices govern the relation to reality that the characters in the novel have. The association of ideas evinces that the characters cannot control their own minds. They are relentlessly assailed by multifarious ideas, enmeshed in a mental life that affects how they experience the world. Accordingly, the muleteer and historiographer of his own life should also try to convey this aspect: For, if he is a man of the least spirit, he will have fifty deviations from a straight line to make with this or that party as he goes along, which he can no ways avoid. He will have views and prospects to himself perpetually soliciting his eye, which he can no more help standing still to look at than he can fly; he will moreover have various Accounts to reconcile: Anecdotes to pick up: Inscriptions to make out: Stories to weave in: Traditions to sift: Personages to call upon: Panegyricks to paste up at this door; Pasquinades at that:——All which both the man and his mule are quite exempt from. To sum up all; there are archives at every stage to be look’d into, and rolls, records, documents, and endless genealogies, which justice ever and anon calls him back to stay the reading of:——In short, there is no end of it, (I, xiv, 41)

Life, or maybe reality at its core, does not unfold as a straight journey but has so many edges, curves, and arabesques that become visible to a frenetic voyeuristic spirit. In Tristram Shandy, the experience of life is best symbolized by Slawkenbergius. This “story represents by all these allegorical levels a kind of fantasy world in which one of the principal facts of existence is that we live in a whirl of incoherent and contradictory shards of all the ages’ learning.”18 Mental life is fueled by the Augustan tradition of “learned wit” with its exuberant inter-

|| 17 John Traugott, Tristram Shandy's World: Sterne's Philosophical Rhetoric (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954), 5. 18 Traugott, Tristram Shandy's World, 18–19.

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textual standards.19 Accordingly, this fragment depicts an anfractuous mental map full of bifurcations leading to all kinds of perspectives, in short, ideas of the overlearned. The narrator recognizes that the muleteer must not heed his mind’s whims, for he is entitled to walk in a frame of mind similar to that of his mules: without preoccupations that might make him go spiritually astray. A pragmatic muleteer is interested in getting to his destination by behaving meekly and following the itinerary learned by rote. This decision transforms the muleteer into the directive function of conscience (perhaps an allusion to Buridian’s ass); he certainly leads the way, but there is no reason for him to replicate his mule’s journey experience. He could give an account of his mental life but is “exempt from” it. Since Tristram tackles genealogy in different senses – for instance, his moral character stems from the personality of all the members of the Shandy family, and his programmatic quest for certainty is kin to Yorick’s, Swift’s, and Shaftesbury’s reflections – genealogy, the biological term for tradition, allows us to speculate about this mule’s origins. It represents the life of a beast, a life stripped of all its reproductive capabilities which precipitates towards the end of the road of a blood-line. Impotence is the mule’s characteristic trait as well as a pervasive motif throughout the novel. It is not only related to Tristram’s incapacity to act – or at least tell a story about his deeds – , but also surrounds the mystery of his Uncle Toby’s groin wound, which might be an inconvenience if he were remotely interested in sexual intercourse. Furthermore, impotence is the source of Walter’s moral “impossibilities,” for he is immersed in theories and has a weak connection to practical matters; and in the last chapter of the last volume, impotence epitomizes the digressive novel as “a cock and bull story”, a story about the alleged impotence of the Shandy bull. Like the mule, Tristram must deal with impotence, but regardless of his incapacity to act, or narrate his actions, he is – quite contrary to the mule – entitled to a vivid mental life. The mule represents thus the stagnation of all the

|| 19 “Learned wit” is a “scholastic approach” with “speculative freedom” and “dialectical ingenuity” which are expressed in “the power to use logic to give show of plausibility to an absurd or unreasonable argument…” D. W. Jefferson, “Tristram Shandy and the Tradition of Learned Wit”, in Laurence Sterne. A collection of critical essays, ed. John Traugott (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1968), 149, 153. Traugott mixes the “learned wit” with Locke and argues that the latter’s influence sheds some light on the question about our knowledge of other minds, which are represented as systems or “satires on systems”, systems that feed his learned wit and “vive la bagatelle”, Traugott, Tristram Shandy's World, 5, 10, 14.

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facets of life but, let us not forget, it is the progeny of the more productive donkey. Asininity, argues G. Bruno, defines the scope and creativity of human knowledge. In Cabala del cavallo Pegaseo (1585), Bruno develops an epistemological metaphor using the ass. For the Nolan, there is a divine asininity or divine principle that created matter, breathed life into all things, and provided them with the immanent motor that brings about form. Human asininity, on the other hand, allows us to conceive theoretical systems and produce imperfect objects. Although humans can only err, being a fool has an ambivalent function for Bruno. It is necessary to be ignorant to attain knowledge as well as to act, since ignorance allows us to adopt the theoretical assumptions enabling actions. This entails an incessant movement. Stagnation is never desired for the ass, since it consolidates as folly. By placing knowledge in perpetual reflection, Bruno is attacking orthodoxy and skepticism, but also leaves asininity in a precarious position. Due to skeptical tenets, Bruno argues that asininity helps to attain truth, but it cannot be taught because one cannot teach false things.20 In view of this predicament, the Nolan argues that knowledge is just an image of god, since divine truth is inaccessible to humans, and it is produced by sense and intellect. Tristram adopts a similar position. For him, “Reason is, half of it, Sense” (VII, xiii, 593). This is the foundation that leads to the ever-becoming moral character and its tentative answers. In a similar vein, Bruno claims that attainable knowledge is provisional and unrelated to causes and science, which establish principles; knowledge hinges on a person and is produced by immanent potency, which is infinite and will continue mutating. Asininity gives rise to inexhaustible manners of manipulating and relating to reality, and its playful journey through ignorance allows one to become an artist who creates with the

|| 20 Although resorting to The Nolan’s thought might seem farfetched in an analysis of Tristram, there are striking similarities between them and Sterne might have been influenced not only by Lucian’s rendering of Momus myth but also by Bruno’s version. Giordano Bruno, Cabale du cheval pégaséen, Œuvres complètes VI, intr. and notes Nicola Badaloni, trans. Tristan Dagron, text established by Giovanni Aquilecchia (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1999) For divine asininity, see 26; for human asininity, see 32–34; for the problem of stagnation and skeptical objection, see 134–140; for becoming an artist, see 140. “J’ai suffisamment montré que, sous l’éminence de la vérité, nous n’avons rien de plus éminent que l’ignorance et l’asinité : car l’asinité est le moyen par lequel la sagesse s’unit à la vérité et l’apprivoise, et il n’y a aucune autre vertu capable d’occuper la pièce attenante, mur à mur, à celle de la vérité. Etant donné que l’intellect humain a quelque accès à la vérité, comme cet accès ne se fait ni par la science ni par la connaissance, il faut nécessairement qu’il se fasse par l’ignorance et l’asinité.” (125)

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materials within reach. In short, the ass can become an autobiographer who endeavors to give an account of oneself.21 However, neither the mule nor the muleteer should be troubled by the false but inconsequential contents of their minds. In the narrator’s view, they are exempt from this asinine task, which is reserved for historians, novelists and artists. The muleteer does not have to make a living with “Pasquinades” and “Panegyricks”, nor comb through traditions for literary devices for his story, nor include anecdotes and characters in his journey without observing any generic constraints, since anyone appearing on the factual road can trace back his steps and show his point of departure on a map. The writer, on the other hand, is expected to take advantage of all available resources to best illustrate how mental life is experienced. If Tristram was not an honest soul, he would spare us some of his digressions and falsify what he is living, but he is compelled to communicate his incessant struggle not to drown in tradition. Orientating oneself when enmeshed in countless discourses represents thus a further circumstance to enact and relive through a narrative, but only if the author possesses a historical consciousness. Tristram knows that the hermeneutical situation determines him, so his behavior “zu seiner Geschichte ist vielmehr durch das Einrücken in die Überlieferung bestimmt. Dieses Einrücken meint dabei nicht ein ausdrückliches Anknüpfen an die Tradition. Die Überlieferung, in die wir einrücken, springt allen willentlichen Verfügungen voraus und wirkt gerade auch dort, wo sie als solche nicht bewusst ist.”22 Tristram cannot or does not want to completely control his digression to show how he lived and continues to live as a writer. He enacts through the narrative structure his historical consciousness. Consequently, this mechanism complements Locke’s influence. If one concedes that this fictive autobiography originates in Tristram’s mind – a contraption devised by Sterne –, then one can claim that we are dealing with a hermeneutically associative consciousness, or wirkungsgeschichtliches assoziatives Bewusstsein.

|| 21 This issue, which is delineated at the end of the second dialogue in Cabala del cavallo Pegaseo, is developed and discussed in De gli eroici furori (1585). The considerations advanced there delve into character as the center of another ethics. For Bruno, there is an interrelationship between the cognitive and the appetitive potencies, since matter seeks a form. Giordano Bruno, Des fureurs Héroїques, Œuvres complètes VI, intr. and notes M. A. Granada, trans. PaulHenri Michel and reviewed by Yves Hersant, text established by Giovanni Aquilecchia (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1999), 32–35. 22 Hans-Helmuth Gander, “Erhebung der Geschichtlichkeit des Verstehens zum hermeneutischen Prinzip (GW 1, 270–311)”, in Hans-Georg Gadamer. Wahrheit und Methode, ed. Günter Figal (Berlin: Akademie, 2007), 121.

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To inquire after the historicity of a narrative voice implies taking a stance on narrative realism. Sterne’s novel stages one of the theoretical issues which are central for presenting a consciousness: it “demonstrates that certain language patterns are unique to fiction, [or in this case to Tristram’s mental world,] and dependent on the presence of fictional minds within the text.”23 Furthermore, Sterne’s novel draws attention to its fictionality and with a doubling creates a mise en abîme. It intimates, through its self-reflexive narrative mode, firstly, that the first-person narrator cannot be identified with the depicted character who lends an identifiable support to this voice. Secondly, the novel’s structure undermines the relevance of the autobiographical pact. The legitimacy that an author confers to his first-person narrator in an autobiography is overshadowed by the skepticism about other minds. There is no distinction between the Self and the Other when writing a biographical account. Both are approached through the same stylistic devices, both seem to pertain to the same category, which allows to jump between characters without affecting the expected results. That is why Tristram constructs the depths of his own inner life indirectly, always commenting on his family’s past pursuits, telling the reader what he thinks, imagines and believes about every topic, sometimes even falling prey to his circumlocutions and ending up in downright monologue.24 Tristram as a narrator is not fishing for compliments on his good judgment when selecting the relevant events, but proudly showcases his mind’s quirks. Notwithstanding, Tristram’s unrestrained eloquence could never be subsumed under the same category as Molly Bloom’s autonomous inner monologue. He is too self-conscious about his project, and his language patterns are governed by his personality,25 so that regularity is granted by a convoluted sec-

|| 23 Grounding her claims in Käte Hamburger’s Die Logik der Dichtung (1957), Cohn advances as the central idea of her study that the representation of a consciousness is mimetic in the sense of a construction. To depict an inner life is to rely on “language patterns [which] are primarily the conveyors or signals of mental activity: verbs of consciousness, interior and narrated monologues, temporal and spatial adverbs referring to the characters’ here and now.” Dorrit Cohn, Transparent Minds (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 7. 24 Three issues should be considered when grappling with the textual presentation of consciousness: “1. psycho-narration: the narrator’s discourse about a character’s consciousness; 2. Quoted monologue: a character’s mental discourse; 3. narrated monologue: a character’s mental discourse in the guise of the narrator’s discourse.” Cohn, Transparent Minds, 14. 25 Cohn, Transparent Minds, 170, 187, 190. For Cohn, Tristram as a narrator is more invested in narrating than in his recollections. He is self-conscious about his endeavor, so he is invested in the present, and due to the gnomic present, his novel acquires the nuances of an essay. Although these are the main features, the present investigation claims that Tristram is invested in

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ond nature projected into a style. Tristram does not depict the immediate reaction of his mind to his surroundings, nor is he driven by sheer arbitrariness and whim, but reveals the variegated realm of ideas and diverse stylistic features that contribute to this end. For instance, all his mental activity is articulated by complex typographical tricks and syntactical pirouettes, both hinting at the richness of the thought palette. They convey how Tristram’s commitment to his utterances wavers. Similarly, the impersonation of characters (when Tristram addresses a Madam or Sir and answers for them) gives rise to a ‘Soliloquy’, to the conversation with the Self that Shaftesbury recommends, and which aims at a kaleidoscopic view of the world. Altogether the digressions and imagined audience convey how the world’s manifoldness is experienced by positing a hermeneutic associative consciousness. For Tristram, narrating implies constructing the depths of his consciousness, which is a mode of narration Ian Watt calls “subjective realism.”26 Subjective realism has two sides: past events and the individual way of depicting them. Therein resides the emphasis on the autobiographer as an historian. “Tristram is not remembering the past but simply setting it down, playing the role of the historian rather than the biographer. The disorderly account we receive of the Shandy family is not a result of Tristram’s psychological involvement in the events he presents, but of the theory of writing he embraces.”27 He is not akratic due to a passion affecting his judgment, but because of his method,

|| the present inasmuch as it represents the only path to a detailed reconstruction of his past, which might suspend the distinction between the two. 26 According to I. Watt, rhetoric is the structuring principle that defines the novel as a whole. For instance, Tristram’s account of his birth as a narrative event “is merely an occasion for talking” (317). “Narrative as such is not autonomous or primary; it is merely the initial fictional pretext for a complex pattern of conversations: conversation between characters, in the first place; and, more important, conversation between Tristram and his readers” (318). Besides revealing the influence of the exuberant Augustan tradition and Shaftesbury’s philosophy, the conversational style, specially its syntax, produces a mise-en-abîme through punctuation and typographical tricks. The latter, “though they may not always amuse us, at least serve to remind us that the image reflected in the mirror is less real than the mirror itself: that the mirror, not the reflections in it, has priority status” (323). Watt’s conclusion is that Tristram Shandy depicts a subjective realism, the unity of which is provided through Tristram’s voice, a voice that regardless of his very sui generis form of interweaving thoughts “is by no means an irrational one, but a rational instrument for the revelation of human irrationality.” (328) Ian Watt, “The Comic Syntax of TS”, in Studies in Criticism and Aesthetics, 1660–1800. Essay in Honor of Samuel Holt Monk, ed. Howard Anderson and John S. Shea (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1967), 315–332. 27 Melvyn New, Laurence Sterne as Satirist, (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1969), 82.

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which is another kind of passion that grapples with the history of ideas and is engrained in his character. This history includes the opinions that led to actions and the ideas that offered materials for the formation of an opinion. He is not strictly concerned with a truth that can be corroborated by observing the facts, but also with the effects of unfounded beliefs and of literary patterns impregnating actions. Hence, Tristram’s theory of writing is obliquely compatible with a psychological account. Though the historian might consciously set the framework on which he based his reconstruction of the events, he is entitled and cannot help having mental habits that affect his work. Apart from narratively exploring the consequences of Locke’s philosophy, the posited mind and its meta-reflections indicate that there are various fictional layers to consider in Sterne’s novel. The narrator is endowed with a multifaceted consciousness that distills an autobiographical life journey: What a rate have I gone on at, curvetting and frisking it away, two up and two down for four volumes together, without looking once behind, or even on one side of me, to see whom I trod upon!—I’ll tread upon no one——quoth I to myself when I mounted———I’ll take a good rattling gallop; but I’ll not hurt the poorest jackass upon the road.——So off I set——up one lane———down another, through this turnpike——over that, as if the archjockey of jockeys had got behind me. (IV, xx, 356)

Tristram has his own hobbyhorse or passion that characterizes him, namely, narrating. By embedding anecdotes and quotes, he is neither neglecting the main plot nor precluding himself from ending his work. Instead, he is exposing his character, so that the object of his obsession is not the representation of past events but imagining and giving free rein to his mind.28 Moral character thus becomes the main structural trait of Tristram’s narrative experiment; it is the matrix or the form predetermining his story. To outline a personality becomes both means and end: To avoid all and every one of these errors in giving you my uncle Toby’s character, I am determined to draw it by no mechanical help whatever;——nor shall my pencil be guided by any one wind-instrument which ever was blown upon, either on this, or on the other side of the Alps;—nor will I consider either his repletions or his discharges,—or touch upon his Non-naturals—but, in a word, I will draw my uncle Toby’s character from his Hobby-Horse. (I, xxiii, 85) || 28 In this paragraph, I paraphrase Rainer Warning’s interpretation, to which my approach to consciousness and character is indebted. Rainer Warning, Illusion und Wirklichkeit in Tristram Shandy und Jacques le Fataliste, (München: Fink, 1965), 10, 15, 17, 48–59.

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By allowing all the members of his family to perform and commenting on their caprioles, Tristram investigates, on the one hand, which traits might be inherited or form part of his cultural heritage. On the other, he proves through his comments how these traits are articulated, thereby revealing a self-reflexive flow and its regularity. And still, within this structuring principle there is room for historiography. As an historian, Tristram “performs an essentially poetic act, in which he prefigures the historical field and constitutes it as a domain upon which to bring to bear the specific theories he will use to explain ‘what was really happening” in it.’”29 Tristram wrestles with tradition, with the events and even with the reader. He is honest and shows that his “historical work represent[s] an attempt to mediate among what [H. White] calls the historical field, the unprocessed historical record, other historical accounts, and an audience.”30 Tristram lays bare how he prefigures the “historical field” on which his narration is supported. From his personality emanates a model for experiencing the world that, together with the redefinition of life, posits the “constitutive concepts” used “to identify the objects that inhabit [a historical, or in this case fictive,] domain and to characterize the kinds of relationships they can sustain with one another.”31 But more important to the present investigation is that the prefiguration has ethical implications engrained in the style: an “ethical moment of a historical work […] reflected in the mode of ideological implication by which an aesthetic perception (the emplotment) and a cognitive operation (the argument) can be combined so as to derive prescriptive statements from what may appear to be purely descriptive or analytical ones.”32 Both life and personality constitute the novel’s poetics, which I brought partly to the surface in (I) by analysing the narrative program. Now it should be || 29 White, Metahistory, X. 30 White, Metahistory, 5. 31 The main ideas I draw from here can be found in the next fragment: “In order to figure ‘what really happened’ in the past, therefore, the historian must first prefigure as a possible object of knowledge the whole set of events reported in the documents. This prefigurative act is poetic in as much as it is precognitive and precritical in the economy of the historian’s own consciousness. It is also poetic insofar as it is constitutive of the structure that will subsequently be imaged in the verbal model offered by the historian as a representation and explanation of ‘what really happened’ in the past. But it is constitutive not only of a domain which the historian can treat as a possible object of (mental) perception. […] In the poetic act which precedes the formal analysis of the field, the historian both creates his object of analysis and predetermines the modality of the conceptual strategies he will use to explain it.” White, Metahistory, 30. 32 White, Metahistory, 27.

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clearer how this program is shaped by a life that includes both mental life and its individual mechanism, and how it alludes to an ethic-aesthetic problem whose possibilities can be unfolded.33 If there are implications in the ‘form’ adopted by the historical account, then other forms of narrative might convey other forms of experience, forms that also express an ethical experience or stance, or can even experiment with ethical assumptions about agency and reason by stating their own immanent structuring principles.34 In view of the transparency with which Sterne’s novel posits and follows its exceptional self-imposed constraints, one wonders whether Tristram is an unreliable narrator, as W. Booth established when coining the concept. Of course he is, but only in relation to the realist tradition and its expectations.35 Despite the

|| 33 Karlheinz Stierle, “Erfahrung und narrative Form. Bemerkungen zu ihrem Zusammenhang in Fiktion und Historiographie”, in Text als Handlung (München: Fink, 2012), 257. Here, Stierle is directly discussing White’s conception of historiography. 34 Stierle’s main idea in “Erfahrung und narrative Form” begins with Benjamin’s reflections on experience and history: “Die Information ist für Benjamin das eigentliche Paradigma moderner Geschichtsschreibung, und das heißt eine Anschauungsform, bei der in spezifischer Weise Ereignis und Erklärung zusammentreffen. Das Ereignis wird durch seine Erklärung gleichsam getilgt, die Erklärung umgekehrt funktional auf die Abarbeitung von Ereignissen bezogen.” (236) But the question posed by Stierle is: “So genau und erhellend Benjamins Betrachtungen über den Zusammenhang einer bestimmten Erfahrung mit einer bestimmten narrativen Form sind, so wenig können sie doch besagen über die Möglichkeit anderer Formen der Erfahrung und anderer Formen der Narration.” (238) The relation that posits the ethicaesthetic conundrum is: “Der bisher Übergang von Geschehen in Geschichte ist indes für das Verständnis der narrativen Form eine allzu einfache Konstruktion. Denn die Welt des Geschehens, aus der sich die Geschichte ausgliedert, ist zugleich eine Welt des Handelns, der sich verwirklichenden und der unverwirklicht bleibenden, der übereinstimmenden und einander widerstreitenden Intentionen. Der Welt des Handelns und damit der Welt der vorausprojizierten Geschichten ist die Welt des Geschehens als Dimension ihrer Verwirklichung und ihres Scheiterns zugeordnet.” (241) The ethos as an immanent principle bounded to fiction can convey a new experience: “Fiktion bedeutet also nicht, daß alle Momente der Fiktion fiktiv sein müßten, sondern nur die vorausgesetzte Spielregel, daß mit der Möglichkeit von Fiktivität zu rechnen ist und daß dann ein besseres Wissen des ‘wahren Sachverhalts’ nichts ausrichten kann. Die Fiktion ist, unabhängig vom Realitätsgehalt ihrer Momente, prinzipiell eine Setzung. Das bedeutet, daß das Faktum in der Fiktion eine Funktion des Erzählens ist, diesem also nicht unbefragt vorausliegt. Auch wo die Fiktion sich auf die Spielregel größtmöglicher Annährungen an das Wirkliche einläßt, hat sie im Einzelnen immer die Möglichkeit, das Geschehen so zu arrangieren, daß es der fiktionsimmanenten Konzeption entspricht. Die Fiktion ist, mit Bezug auf das, was sie darstellt, immer unzuverlässig.” (244) 35 Booth defines the reliable narrator thusly: “I have called a narrator reliable when he speaks for or acts in accordance with the norms of the work (which is to say, the implied author’s norms), unreliable when he does not. It is true that most of the great reliable narrators indulge

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impossibility of ending his project, Tristram’s narration complies with the norms and parameters that he establishes, disregarding the genre’s expectations and common sense. One can trust his whimsical style. His reliability is grounded in the potentiality of his narrative form. The narrative program together with life and character imply that it is just a matter of energy and time for endless possibilities to become a story and make Tristram’s life ever more complicated. What Tristram posits with his narrative program is neither a goal, nor his life’s deeds, nor even chapters on knots, buttons, etc., but a baffling autobiographical sincerity that seeks to put on paper all the ideas that could pass through his mind.36 Paradoxically, Tristram cannot tell the truth but just give his opinions. He cannot only bring up the facts and strive towards truth, so he must settle with verisimilitude. While autobiography sacrifices aesthetic criteria for the benefit of the ethical and must expunge any ornaments in order to be true; Tristram reveals the close relationship between style and ethical framework and exploits aesthetic resources to experiment with ethics.37 This trait of Sterne’s style is not so unlikely for his times. In this respect, M. New argues that “the seventeenthcentury literature that can be called wit-writing or wit-as-a-process and the hack-writing that derived from it […] disdained all tradition, authority, or rules, and their only virtue was the reflection of the writer’s own eccentric mind.”38 This is the secret of Tristram’s trade: depicting his chaotic mental life and the workings of his imagination39 is artifice, the mastered clumsiness of a clown: “the satirist has carefully and deliberately shaped the disorder of his work, and the reader relishes this irony as well; behind our condemnation of the persona’s

|| in large amounts of incidental irony, and they are thus “unreliable” in the sense of being potentially deceptive. … Unreliable narrators thus differ markedly depending on how far and in what direction they depart from the author’s norms; …” Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 158–159. 36 This is Rainer Warning’s reflection, who discusses with Booth and does not consider a conventional or expected end and a representation of reality as the novel’s goals. Instead, Warning sees the propelling force of the novel in narrating. Warning, Illusion und Wirklichkeit, 15–17. 37 The struggle between ethics and aesthetics is engrained in the genre, but, according to Mathieu-Castellani, the absence of ornaments is impossible and “le refus de la rhétorique est lui-même rhétorique” Mathieu-Castellani, La scène judiciaire de l’autobiographie, 26–27. 38 New, Laurence Sterne as Satirist, 55. 39 The crucial role of imagination, or more precisely fantasy, reveals the Aristotelian vein of Tristram’s ethical inquiry, since it correlates ethics, rhetoric, poetics and psychological assumptions that ground ethical appraisal in a faculty common to judging and making images. Eden, Poetic and Legal Fiction 81–85.

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artlessness is the awareness that the author has purposefully and expertly made him the artless dunce he is.”40

2.3 Protagoras’ protean dilemma: Ulrich reflecting on reflecting fluids 2.3.1 Even before pondering: life as a journey without autonomy If we think about Ulrich instead of Tristram, the last animal that would come to our minds would be a dunce. Quite the contrary, Ulrich charmingly undermines everybody’s opinions without losing his ironic and skeptical upper hand, at least not until the second part of the novel in which he gets involved with Agathe and both become committed to actively bringing about the “anderen Zustand.” But despite their different personalities, Ulrich and Tristram are kindred spirits. Born to the same star, both lead a hypercritical life of inaction and calamities. While Tristram’s is equipped with a hermeneutically associative consciousness, Ulrich has a chameleonic mind camouflaging itself to match its environment. A close but in no way exhaustive reading of the 40th chapter of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften will pinpoint the affinities between the motif of life as a journey and the protagonist’s internal conflict, which is laconically stated thusly: “Ulrich ist ein Mensch, der von irgend etwas gezwungen wird, gegen sich

|| 40 New, Laurence Sterne as Satirist, 59. For New, Laurence Sterne was an orthodox Anglican and the conflict that could have ensued because of his Augustan heritage is just in appearance. Tristram’s wit and fanciful occurrences are stylistic devices that bring laughter, but it is a special kind of laughter. According to New, one should see the ridicule produced by human passions, specially pride, and discover forbearance, become meek; laughter shows that one cannot rely on oneself in moral matters. My interpretation contests this harsh stance. New’s critique is grounded in the Shandean individual’s inability to attain a transcendental perspective. Without the certainty that a Kantian Reason, for instance, might warrant, any attempt seems futile. But if we do not strive for transcendental solutions nor rely on authority and consider Tristram’s narrative experiment as an inquiry after the judgment that a finite reason can build, if we do not dismiss a construction just because it’s not perfect and avows its constraints, maybe then we could consider that Tristram Shandy exploits a humanist vein. This framework does not dismiss the latitudinarian moral compass attained through revelation, it just flirts with the idea that Sterne might have chosen the novel as a genre which, in comparison to a sermon or a theological essay, allows him to posit God as something about which one observes a vow of silence, and in which divine questions need be suspended to explore the limits of ethical judgement. See also 26–27, 55.

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selbst zu leben, obgleich er sich scheinbar ohne Zwang gehen läßt.” (MoE 151– 152) Although Musil’s prose flows in such a way that it results challenging – sometimes even impossible – to discern between the narrator’s words and Ulrich’s thoughts, in this focalization there is no ambiguity, only a transparent and terse characterization. The narrator is ascribing, not an attribute, but a disposition, even a stance adopted to put under scrutiny rationality, autonomy, life, and the stories told to convey these ideas. Cultural coercion assails Ulrich’s life and despite complying with notional circumstance he still feels like he is living against himself. To understand the previous statement, one must bear in mind that, in Musil’s novel, ideas are developed in an intricate manner to interconnect diverse topics that ramify into scattered motifs. In this context, the reader’s attention was drawn in the previous chapter towards a virulent thinking pattern, a pattern enthroned as necessity in the Kakanian society: “Auf A war immer B gefolgt, ob das nun im Kampf oder in der Liebe geschah.” (MoE 148) This preamble alludes to the old worldview that led Ulrich to a career as cavalry officer and to his love story with the Lieutenant’s wife, and in this manner introduces the topos of life as a journey. That a biographical account is the center of the inquiry becomes evident after Ulrich asks himself, why didn’t he simply become a pilgrim? (MoE 153). With the genre well demarcated, his thoughts transition to considerations on a topic of utmost importance to this type of biographical account, namely, autonomy. What good would a pilgrimage or an adventure bring if the path suddenly becomes meaningless? “Warum lebte er also unklar und unentschieden? Ohne Zweifel, – sagte er sich – was ihn in eine abgeschiedene und unbenannte Daseinsform bannte, war nichts als der Zwang zu jenem Lösen und Binden der Welt, das man mit einem Wort, dem man nicht gerne allein begegnet, Geist nennt” (MoE 153). In Ulrich’s world, the axis of moral values is prone to change, so any heroic attempt can be unveiled as a ridiculous undertaking. Still, with strategic thinking and a pragmatic approach, there is always the possibility to overcome our flimsy situation. Ulrich has no doubt about this: “Er hat es den Jahrhunderten abgelernt, daß Laster zu Tugenden und Tugenden zu Lastern werden können, und hält es im Grunde bloß für eine Ungeschicklichkeit, wenn man es nicht fertig bringt, in der Zeit eines Lebens aus einem Verbrecher einen nützlichen Menschen zu machen” (MoE 153). To follow the tide of his times might not have been impossible for Ulrich, who had the means, position, and intellect. But as we know, despite these attributes, he preferred a “Urlaub vom Leben,” maybe because implementing strategies would not quench his thirst for

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autonomy, nor allow him to attain rationality in the sense of consistency between mental and factual life. To follow the Zeitgeist would have been equivalent to saying B because the circumstances started with A. Furthermore, irrationality, the key piece of the praxis puzzle, is also present in this pondering. After witnessing a fight between two bourgeois citizens and a drunk laborer, Ulrich – always fundamentally committed to Moosbrugger’s cause – wants to be of assistance, or at least speak his mind, and tells a police officer that accountability is maimed while we are sleeping or drunk: “Er hatte aus dem Auflauf das Wort ‘Majestätsbeleidigung’ vernommen und bemerkte, daß dieser Mensch in seinem Zustand nicht imstande sei, eine Beleidigung zu begehen, und daß man ihn schlafen schicken solle” (MoE 157). For Ulrich, an insult denotes intention, and, in this case, it is impossible to raise a claim on intentional actions. But his argument is deemed irrelevant. Instead, his Shandean remark – interrupting and alluding to a theoretical framework – wins him a trip to the police headquarters where he is interrogated to ascertain his identity, or rather to be assigned a personal identity. This scene depicts an institutional power assessing and categorizing an “I”, enfolding him in language: his physical traits and events of his life are captured as data that potentially add up to a biography, since they can give rise to a narration.41 This episode ends with Ulrich going home without charges. He turns out to be – even before he knows it – a key figure with powerful friends, that is, an influential member of the Parallel Campaign. After acquitting him, the chief of police tells him that Graf Leinsdorf asked about his whereabouts, and in that moment the social pressure – turned into a causal net – makes it impossible for him to keep avoiding his interview with Graf Leinsdorfand consequently becoming his right hand. Overall, this chapter depicts how a simple walk, spent mostly pondering, can lead, thanks to contingency, to an unwanted and unforeseen situation. Ulrich was arrested, not for breaking a law, but because of a police officer’s whim, his irritation at Ulrich’s demand to be treated with deference, “was unerwarteterweise die Schutzmannschaft zu der Einsicht brachte, daß ein Betrunkener für die Anwesenheit von drei Schutzleuten nicht genüge, so daß sie Ulrich gleich auch mitnahmen” (MoE 158). Ironically, this scene interrupted Ulrich’s reflections on his life, his past goals, achievements, the control he had over them and his inability to find a desirable path. All this had nothing to do with

|| 41 Lübbe calls these traits “Erzählprovokatoren” and they are used to identify somebody and also to formulate a potential story that could conform an identity. Hermann Lübbe, “Identität und Kontingenz”, in Poetik und Hermeneutik, 655.

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the development of the events. His pondering and his factual life run like two parallel rivers that never meet, always separated by an irony that casts its shadow on will, decisions, and certainty: Zwei Ulriche gingen in diesem Augenblick. Der eine sah sich lächelnd um und dachte: “Da habe ich also einmal eine Rolle spielen wollen, zwischen solchen Kulissen wie diesen. Ich bin eines Tages erwacht, nicht weich wie in Mutters Körbchen, sondern mit der harten Überzeugung, etwas ausrichten zu müssen. Man hat mir Stichworte gegeben, und ich habe gefühlt, sie gehen mich nichts an. Wie von flimmerndem Lampenfieber war damals alles mit meinen eigenen Vorsätzen und Erwartungen ausgefüllt gewesen. Unmerklich hat sich aber inzwischen der Boden gedreht, ich bin ein Stück meines Wegs voran gekommen und stehe vielleicht schon beim Ausgang. Über kurz wird es mich hinausgedreht haben, und ich werde von meiner großen Rolle gerade gesagt haben: ‘Die Pferde sind gesattelt.’ Möge euch alle der Teufel holen!” (MoE 155)

All his life, Ulrich felt like a promising young man who would achieve something in a specific discipline. As he repeatedly claims, he possesses the attributes and the conviction to act. He still has the ‘Kraft einer Überzeugung,’ but the specific contents of this conviction seem beyond his reach; he cannot fully grasp what should be the content of the life he is trying to lead. He has the will, but the second Ulrich, the intellect, is the one complicating his life: Aber während der eine mit diesen Gedanken lächelnd durch den schwebenden Abend ging, hielt der andre die Fäuste geballt, in Schmerz und Zorn; er war der weniger sichtbare, und woran er dachte, war, eine Beschwörungsformel zu finden, einen Griff, den man vielleicht packen könnte, den eigentlichen Geist des Geistes, das fehlende, vielleicht nur kleine Stück, das den zerbrochenen Kreis schließt. (MoE 155)

Ulrich’s hypercritical Self sees compromise in any course of action, a compromise he is not willing to make, maybe due to his lack of conviction or faith, so in most cases he decides not to act.42 His retreat from life hinges on a search for a

|| 42 Ulrich’s position reminds us of Kierkegaard’s “Ultimatum” in Either/Or, but without the leap of faith that moves one to act: “Gegen Gott haben wir immer unrecht, dieser Gedanke tut also dem Zweifel Einhalt und besänftigt seinen Kummer, er ermutigt und begeistert zum Handeln.” (932) Furthermore, a finite reason will inevitably err in its endless path towards truth: “Das erbauliche, das in dem Gedanken liegt, daß wir gegen Gott immer unrecht haben.” Formation is thus not guided by transcendence but driven by the skeptical idea that one cannot teach something false and has to rely on the immanent approach of a finite reason: “So ist also der Wunsch, unrecht zu haben, Ausdruck für ein unendliches Verhältnis, die Einstellung, daß man recht haben will oder es schmerzlich findet, unrecht zu haben, Ausdruck für ein endliches

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complete image, for the final piece without which it is impossible to complete the puzzle of certainty. The moral of Ulrich’s encounter with the law is that a mere opinion can push the plot forward, but even this insignificant gesture goes against Ulrich’s principles. He is not satisfied with any of his expressions, since they all lack a handle that would provide him with a good enough grasp of his puzzling life. The intellectual side of Ulrich cannot get a hold of the world or its events. Ulrich is most likely referring here to Epictetus’ famous aphorism, in which he likens our ability to be satisfied with a situation to picking up an object by the handle which allows us to carry it. In Tristram Shandy, this aphorism serves as an epistemological metaphor. But for Ulrich, this is a question overshadowed by further traces of humanism.43 Besides the loss of a moral compass associated with axiology’s fugacity, Ulrich reflects upon a carnivalesque inversion: he knows that opposites are only notionally distant, “[e]r weiß, daß die Schleimhaut der Lippen mit der Schleimhaut des Darms verwandt ist, weiß aber auch, daß die Demut dieser Lippen mit der Demut alles Heiligen verwandt ist. Er bringt durcheinander, löst auf und hängt neu zusammen. Gut und bös, oben und unten sind für ihn nicht skeptisch-relative Vorstellungen, wohl aber Glieder einer Funktion” (MoE 153). The body’s upper and lower ducts are interchangeable, both can channel either nefarious, neutral or holy actions. In this manner, the carnivalesque is linked to the scientificist conception of a world of functions. The divine appears throughout the novel’s thematic clusters. In this context, there is a revealing relation to Moosbrugger. The turn-of-the-century redeemer symbolizes a world order in crisis, but also embodies the lost chthonic powers which motivated a quarrel between the drunken worker and the two members of the bourgeoise, who represent the powers that be. The dispute that took place just before Ulrich walked by began thusly: “Denn ein Arbeiterblatt hatte, wie Graf Leinsdorf das nennen würde, destruktiven Speichel über die Große Idee ergossen, indem es behauptete, daß diese sich bloß als eine neue

|| Verhältnis! So ist es also erbaulich, immer unrecht zu haben, denn nur das Unendliche erbaut, das Endliche nicht!” Sören Kierkegaard, Entweder – Oder, ed. Hermann Diem and Walter Rest, trans. Heinrich Fauteck (München: DTV, 2005), 926. 43 Epictetus, Discourses, Fragments, Handbook, translated by Robin Hard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 300–301. “Everything has two handles, and it may be carried by one of these handles, but not by the other. If your brother acts wrongly towards you, don’t try to grasp the matter by this handle, that he is wronging you (because that is the handle by which it can’t be carried), but rather by the other, that he is your brother, he was brought up with you, and then you’ll be grasping the matter by the handle by which it can be carried.”

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Sensation der Herrschenden an den letzten Lustmord reihe, und ein braver Arbeiter, der ein wenig viel getrunken hatte, fühlte sich dadurch gereizt” (MoE 156). With this frame of mind, any pretext could trigger the worker’s need and right to express himself. For instance, alcohol in his veins and animated by the crowd gathering to see the fight – an admittedly biased picture of a workingclass person who drinks and uncritically absorbs propaganda – he is filled with confidence: “Das erregte Aufsehen schmeichelte dem Betrunkenen, und eine bis dahin verheimlichte völlige Abneigung gegen das Mitgeschöpf zeigte sich entfesselt” (MoE 157). His longing for self-assertion – and equality – is thus enflamed; he begins to experience something comparable to what Moosbrugger and the mystics undergo. Moosbrugger was always marginalized by his colleagues and this isolation deeply affected him: “[I]hm kam das wie ein stärkeres und höheres Gefühl von seinem Ich vor. Sein ganzes Leben war ein zum Lachen und Entsetzen unbeholfener Kampf, um Geltung dafür zu erzwingen” (MoE 71, emphasis mine). However, his battle was not always fought in an abstract dimension with recognition at stake. In some situations, he reaffirmed his position with physical violence. “Er hatte schon als Bursche einem Brotherrn die Finger gebrochen, als dieser ihn züchtigen wollte” (MoE 71). In a similar manner, alcohol sparked the laborer’s “I”, who sought to manipulate the world, to act: “Ein leidenschaftlicher Kampf um Geltung begann. Ein höheres Gefühl von seinem Ich setzte sich mit einem unheimlichen Gefühl auseinander, als wäre er nicht fest in seiner Haut. Auch die Welt war nicht fest; sie war ein unsicherer Hauch, der sich immerzu deformierte und die Gestalt wechselte” (MoE 157 emphasis mine). Inebriation is the chthonic tonic which allows one to ground a state of affairs or brings about a state of disassociation similar to madness. Everything seems to be possible and one is prone to think: “Ich bin berufen, bei ihnen Ordnung zu machen, fühlte der ungewöhnlich Betrunkene.” (MoE 157) One could object that this net which brings together the carnival, mystical experience, Moosbrugger, and a drunk is still far from Ulrich’s split personality. Ulrich’s habit of “living against himself” is best exemplified by his remorse. He does not act but gives a piece of his mind and is detained, therefore finding himself in a situation that prompts him to stop criticizing like an insolent dunce: “Ulrich begriff mit einemmal, daß er sich nur durch kälteste Klugheit aus der Lage ziehen könne, in die er durch seine Torheit geraten war” (MoE 160). Instead of his quixotic demeanor, minding his own business would have spared him some inconveniences, but prudence is not the relevant feature in this scene. Torheit is what fuels the plot and this folly refers to taking a stance in the world and acting consequently. It represents, thus, finding a “handle” by

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which to manipulate the world. It is not so much about acting against the social norms, but rather about Erasmian folly, that is, about the drunkenness that reveals an image of the world which compels him to act, about stopping a train of thought in order to commit oneself to epistemological and axiological assumptions that lead to action. In short, folly is simply the conviction that puts somebody in motion: the “Kraft einer Überzeugung.”44 As counterpoint to folly we do not find in this fragment seriousness or gravity, but Klugheit, the cleverness that acts according to the circumstances. For instance, prudence dictated that Ulrich should stop being silly and think pragmatically when questioned in presidium, which is an unsuitable place to dissect his intentions: “Man befragte ihn weiter. Er stellte sich vor, welche Wirkung es haben würde, wenn er, nach seiner Wohnung gefragt, antworten wollte, meine Wohnung ist die einer mir fremden Person? Oder auf die Frage, warum er getan habe, was er getan hatte, erwiderte, er tue immer etwas anderes als das, worauf es ihm wirklich ankomme?” (MoE 160) This train of thought, which reminds us how Moosbrugger failed his rationality test, depicts the critical stance that hinders Ulrich from calling his acts autonomous. He lives a contradictory double life: “Die innere Autorität des Geistes war dabei in einer äußerst peinlichen Weise ohnmächtig gegenüber der äußeren Autorität des Wachtmeisters” (MoE 160). There is no harmony between his multiple lives. The factual or practical life depends on an external set of rules, on the order of the state and its institutions. Even if he chooses an idea, it is always folly, since his hypercritical stance insists that any decision is a bad decision. Here, the watchman’s appearance reinforces the suspicion that Musil might be drawing from Epictetus. As Foucault tells us, the character of the watchman represented one technique of the self in antiquity. The watchman “will not admit anyone into town if that person cannot prove who he is (we must be "watchmen" over the flux of thought).”45 However, if Ulrich wants to lead a life and avoid stagnation, he must ignore his inner officious watchman and rely on cleverness to navigate the world.

|| 44 See chapter 1.3.2 45 Michel Foucault, Ethics: Subjectivity and truth, The Essential Works 1954–1984, vol. 1, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Huerley et al. (New York: New Press, 1997), 240. “There are two metaphors important from his point of view: the night watchman, who will not admit anyone into town if that person cannot prove who he is (we must be "watchmen" over the flux of thought), and the moneychanger, who verifies the authenticity of currency, looks at it, weighs and assures himself of its worth. We have to be moneychangers of our own representations, of our thoughts, vigilantly testing them, verifying them, their metal, weight, effigy.” And “When Epictetus says you must be a moneychanger, he means as soon as an idea comes to mind you have to think of the rules you must apply to evaluate it.”

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2.3.2 Sentient fluids “To think” is always a short step away from becoming Moosbrugger’s “wild thinking.” In Ulrich’s case though, our protagonist’s fictional mind has already been tamed. His thought-patterns are comparable to Tristram’s hermeneutically associative consciousness. Due to their punctilious idiosyncrasy both lead a life voided of deeds. They are voyeurs who need scenery to distract them, reflect on, and become overwhelmed by their opinions thereon. Notwithstanding, while Tristram has a permissive watchman, Ulrich has commissioned an officious doorman whose requirements can never be met and, consequently, would never grant Ulrich access to a vantage point. As we will now see, in chapter 18, this impossibility is shown to be a consequence of what it means to think in narrative fiction. After a chapter on what the contents of a great idea could be, the plot transitions to a new scene: Ulrich is in front of his desk and wants to pick up an unfinished experiment. He wants to exemplify a mathematical operation with an equation of state describing water, that is, he wants to fill a set of functions with a content, fill the vase of an idea, “aber seine Gedanken waren wohl schon vor einer Weile abgeschweift. ‘Habe ich nicht Clarisse etwas vom Wasser erzählt?’ fragte er sich, vermochte jedoch nicht, sich deutlich zu erinnern. Doch das war auch gleichgültig, und seine Gedanken breiteten sich nachlässig aus. Es ist leider in der schönen Literatur nichts so schwer wiederzugeben wie ein denkender Mensch” (MoE 111). In a digressive manner that resembles Sterne’s style, the narrator reveals the main topic that was already conveyed by the plot. Ulrich has refrained from social contact and has not even left the house in days. The ideas that assault him are not those related to leading an active life, but to a life of contemplation analogous to Tristram’s life as an autobiographer. During his seclusion, Ulrich reflects on how ideas with the appropriate substratum come suddenly into being: “Sie sind zu einem nicht kleinen Teil ein Erfolg des Charakters, beständiger Neigungen, ausdauernden Ehrgeizes und unablässiger Beschäftigung” (MoE 112). To this mixture one must add luck and experience, a situation similar to that of “ein[em] Hund, der einen Stock im Maul trägt, durch eine schmale Tür will; er dreht dann den Kopf solange links und rechts, bis der Stock hindurchrutscht, und ganz ähnlich tun wir’s, bloß mit dem Unterschied, daß wir nicht ganz wahllos darauf los versuchen, sondern schon durch Erfahrung ungefähr wissen, wie man es zu machen hat” (MoE 112). With this example, Ulrich puts into perspective the fact that we automatize solutions that came to us by chance, and we do not only rely on our capacity to

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abstract, but also on incessant effort. To an absolute reason, we must offer a similar show in any of our endeavors. The example of the dog with a stick in its mouth, already referred to in Chapter 1 in relation to ground-breaking discoveries, posits a problem for autonomy. After engaging with the circumstances, we start to wonder whether what we call intuition is something extraneous and beyond our reach, an arbitrary array of elements converging in our heads: “Dieses verdutzte Gefühl nennen viele Leute heutigentags Intuition, nachdem man es früher Inspiration genannt hat, und glauben etwas Unpersönliches darin sehen zu müssen; es ist aber nur etwas Unpersönliches, nämlich die Affinität und Zusammengehörigkeit der Sachen selbst, die in einem Kopf zusammentreffen” (MoE 112). A hint at the secularization of the world is to be found in the shift from inspiration to intuition. These dissimilar concepts are both nourished by dominant images of the world; however, the question is left unanswered. Ulrich does not inquire after the heteronomous elements that help us to render the world intelligible, for instance, a religion, or a common sense with intuition. Instead, his reflections revolve around the subjective traits that make an idea personal. Here, the paradox is that these traits appear momentarily, only to be grasped in unfinished thoughts. They are ineffable and never become a thought or something we could call downright thinking: “Je besser der Kopf, desto weniger ist dabei von ihm wahrzunehmen” (MoE 112). Autonomy thus resides in what never came to be. It is only present in the process that attends to the affects and ideas mixed inside a mind. Communicable ideas are finished thoughts articulated in language or in the form of a mathematical formula, so any solution represents a reduction of the actual experience of thinking: “[W]enn es fertig ist, hat es [das Denken] schon nicht mehr die Form des Gedankens, in der man es erlebt, sondern bereits die des Gedachten, und das ist leider eine unpersönliche, denn der Gedanke ist dann nach außen gewandt und für die Mitteilung an die Welt hergerichtet” (MoE 112). For this reason, fiction represents the sole means by which to explore this process, at least until neurobiology devices a method to translate physical impulses into data that accurately distinguish between simultaneous operations of thought. Narrative fiction allows us to speculate on how ideas come to be. A scientist does not have to think about how he or she becomes the vessel of common sense, whereas a writer’s utmost task is to depict how somebody experiences the process of thinking; he struggles to grasp “den Moment zwischen dem Persönlichen und dem Unpersönlichen” (MoE 112). If Ulrich wishes to catch a glimpse of this process, he must presuppose the capacities at work when thinking. However, this “head”, where everything con-

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verges, is just the container of an idea, whereas Ulrich is equally interested in an idea’s specific contents. “Was ist es dann? Aus- und eingehende Welt; Seiten der Welt, die sich in einem Kopf zusammenbilden” (MoE 112). In the Epictetus motif, the world’s handles refer to the sides involved in making the world intelligible, to impressions and expressions, to what Tristram calls opinions. However, since the content of the vessel in Ulrich’s metaphor is water, it is implied that ideas are liquid and can assume infinite variations. After this digression, Ulrich returns to his initial train of thought and mentions water’s diverse cultural connotations, from its scientific descriptions to its relation to myths, religion, etc. For some people, the first passive contact with water is baptism, a liquid initiation that channels life towards a religious end. Now an active contact with one of the forms that water can assume is in school, where we are taught a simple lesson: “da ist nun Wasser eine farblose, nur in dicken Schichten blaue, geruch- und geschmacklose Flüssigkeit, was man so oft in der Schule aufgesagt hat, […] “ (MoE 113). This commonsensical description can become even more aseptic if we reduce water to H₂O. Such formulas are learned by rote and in such a manner, “daß man es nie wieder vergessen kann, obgleich physiologisch auch Bakterien, Pflanzenstoffe, Luft, Eisen, schwefelsaurer und doppeltkohlensaurer Kalk dazugehören und das Urbild aller Flüssigkeiten physikalisch im Grunde gar keine Flüssigkeit, sondern je nachdem ein fester Körper, eine Flüssigkeit oder ein Gas ist” (MoE 113). Water can result far more complex than we know or assume to know for pragmatic and operational reasons in our everyday life. If we, like Ulrich, stop to reflect upon water and try to establish a concept, a subsuming formula, or the paradigmatic image that gives origin to all variations, we will discover two things. Firstly, water has far more elements in its actual form than in its abstract form. For instance, the water that we drink every day is never the same; its components and their relative percentage varies. Secondly, every time we think about water we picture a liquid, but water is not bound to one state. In conclusion, when we talk about water, we are never talking about the same thing but about a something whose state, composition, and container are never fixed: “Schließlich löst sich das Ganze in Systeme von Formeln auf, die untereinander irgendwie zusammenhängen, und es gibt in der weiten Welt nur einige Dutzend Menschen, die selbst von einem so einfachen Ding, wie es Wasser ist, das gleiche denken; alle anderen reden davon in Sprachen, die zwischen heute und einigen tausend Jahren früher irgendwo zu Hause sind” (MoE 113). Talking about water is having an opinion about water, and every time we use the word it is possible that it does not convey the meaning we are searching – unless there are pragmatic pointers, like when we are referring

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to the sea in front of us or talking in a classroom with H₂O written on the blackboard. Overall, this chapter demonstrates the literary representation of a thinking mind through showing and telling. Through digression and sudden trains of thought it discusses the relationship between experience, theory and character, alludes to the dimension of the lived events that turn into experience, and thematizes the reduction of meaning that can occur when we refer to variegated entities like water. Language appears to handle the world from one of its sides, but disregards its composing elements, state, and form. Here, one could add an allegorical reading. Man is said to be ninety percent water, a phrase that sounds trite but might be the contemporary attire of the protean man, the chameleonic man enthroned by Pico della Mirandola as the most noteworthy creature.46 This remark paves the way for a more complex problem. Protean people share water as a natural substratum, but as we know, the relation between its other (accidental?) constitutive elements fluctuates, so a protean person can never be said to be the same. His physiology plays a role in giving a form to ideas and might give us a clue towards understanding him. But despite the available descriptions of a body’s composition, its relation to the mind is just a matter of speculation or fiction, which can narratively elaborate on sentiments, moods, compulsions, obsessions, and pangs. Furthermore, in this metaphorical reading, the body is split into two parts, that is, the state of the matter, whether liquid, gas, solid, or plasma, and the vase it fills. In short, we are talking about a glass of water, a liquid in a container that impedes it from seeping or scattering.47 The vessel is temporary though. What looks like a diaphanous contour might only be a form we have already systematized and learned to interrogate. Due to its constant contact with the liquid, the glass walls will mollify, transform from within, or perhaps will yield to the seasons and become unrecognizable as glass in the long term. As a means to attain a regularity by which to handle the world, diverse functions are instrumentalized to fix a form, or the scaffolding provided by an equation describing the state of water or Zustandsgleichung des Wassers (MoE 111). But the equation alludes to a || 46 See footnote 138. 47 This paragraph is a humble attempt to exploit José Gorostiza’s imagery in Muerte sin fin: “No obstante —oh paradoja— constreñida / por el rigor del vaso que la aclara, / el agua toma forma. / En él se asienta, ahonda y edifica, / cumple una edad amarga de silencios / y un reposo gentil de muerte niña, / sonriente que desflora / un más allá de pájaros / en desbandada. / En la red de cristal que la estrangula, / allí, como en el agua de un espejo, / se reconoce; / atada allí, gota con gota, / marchito el tropo de espuma en la garganta” José Gorostiza, “Muerte sin fin”, in Poesía (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2004), 107–108.

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further abstract layer, since it is governed by a mathematical operation, a mathematischen Vorgang (MoE 111) alluding to a symbolic form. Now, in the case of protean people, this “operation,” which seeks to posit a regularity beyond actual corporeal form or an idea’s actual framing, can only be extricated from utterances and actions. Speech and actions grant access to this ever-changing narrative identity, an ethos wandering through cultural and physical circumstances. Ulrich’s allegorical digression ends with the image of protean men talking about water, about human nature. Such a conversation is haunted by solipsism, that is, by the problem that ensues when man as the measure of all things is a protean person talking with other protean individuals. Like in Moosbrugger’s trial, opinions grounded in dissimilar premises will lead to an impasse. Such a destiny partly explains the coda of this train of thought, which is Ulrich drowning in a glass of water: “Man muß also sagen, daß ein Mensch, wenn er nur ein bißchen nachdenkt, gewissermaßen in recht unordentliche Gesellschaft gerät?” (MoE 113) Such is the Shandean society too. Chaotic conversations characterize meetings between the Shandys in which everybody has their own peculiar manner of interpreting things and therefore the possibilities for communication are reduced. Without deliberation, the “Gesellschaft” is not grounded in communication, but on the acknowledgement of the other. Despite the ominous solipsism, Ulrich refers in this fragment to multiplicity, to all the opinions drawn on in this train of thought as a means to discover the possibilities and complexities of water. His reflections comply with the recommendations made by Shaftesbury for the art of self-dissection or Soliloquy. Ulrich is closer to Tristram than he seems, especially in his iteration as a character in Musil’s unfinished work, Monsieur le vivisecteur. He is also assailed by the voices of tradition, or perhaps more precisely, science. Both Ulrich and Tristram bring to life diverse opinions in the process of thinking; they vivify arcane philosophers and actualize them. The task of depicting a person in the process of thinking through textual devices implies a stance comparable to the Shandean redefinition of life. An experience of thinking that cannot be depicted linearly. This stable form has become naturalized, but also ossified, so that its inflexible trajectory seems now so unrelated to life as A is to B. Life consists in more than the simple concatenation of actions that lead to a journey’s end. This perspective problematizes the panoramic view over bourgeois society in which actions are a common effort and goal. There is a systemic proclivity for bovarysm, for becoming entangled in the fictions that serve partly as the fuel of their everyday life, for instance:

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Dabei waren Klementine und Leo, wie alle Welt, der das durch Sitte und Literatur eingeredet wird, in dem Vorurteil befangen, daß sie durch ihre Leidenschaften, Charaktere, Schicksale und Handlungen voneinander abhingen. In Wahrheit besteht aber natürlich das Dasein mehr als zur Hälfte nicht aus Handlungen, sondern aus Abhandlungen, deren Meinung man in sich aufnimmt, aus Dafürhalten mit entgegensprechendem Dagegenhalten und aus der aufgestapelten Unpersönlichkeit dessen, was man gehört hat und weiß. (MoE 206–205)

Quixotism as a topos in modern literature is magnified to reveal its consequences when it becomes the basis of a worldview. The moment there is more than a ruling doxa – embodied by his majesty Franz Joseph I – , but diverse inactive actors whose private ideas permeate the factual, it is difficult to conceive strategies to manipulate events. Arnheim, Diotima’s lover, businessman, and man of letters despised by Ulrich, best exemplifies an historical actor whose private opinions and utterances affect how events develop. He represents, according to Sektionschef Tuzzi, a case in which “die Grenze zwischen amtlicher und privater Bedeutung von Personen und Erscheinungen heute nicht immer klar zu bestimmen sei“ (MoE 208). His prolific production as an author who can touch upon any subject with an impressive acumen for a non-specialist might shed some light on his financial decisions and unveil the ends to which he can put his industrial resources to use. Arnheim’s opinions, though remotely related to his actions, have such bearing on the world he is embedded in that the government could guess his moves on the international chess board by delving into his texts. But as is the case with Moosbrugger and Tristram – whose thorough biographies are the best tool to judge their intentions – this is an impossible task. The first problem with opinions is their oblique relationship with the world. They belong to a Zeitgeist. They are not “greifbare, sozusagen verantwortliche Äußerungen, die in Zusammenhang mit festen Verhältnissen, Mächten und Begriffen stehn” (MoE 201). Opinions are treacherous handles. Secondly, their sheer number leads once again to an insurmountable task for the government: “‘Man kann dem Ministerium nicht einen ganzen Stab von Buch- und Theaterkritikern angliedern,’ stellte Tuzzi lächelnd fest ‘aber andererseits, wenn man einmal darauf aufmerksam wird, ist nicht zu leugnen, daß solche Leute auf die Bildung der in der Welt herrschenden Anschauungen nicht ohne Einfluß sind und auf diesem Wege auch in die Politik wirken’” (MoE 120). Fictions, simulations, opinions, even lies are elements which can be gathered together under an umbrella term. Although their interconnection might be oblique, they seep through the pores of the factual to constitute reality. They confirm the Zeitgeist that implies an image of the world and the minds that can access it. But beyond these metaphysical claims – which might seem like weak arguments, even about a fictional world – this

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enactment of someone thinking hints at the coherence of Musil’s novel and at its affinity to Tristram Shandy. Life is only accessible through a mental life that posits its structuring principles. In a sense, then, we are dealing with grammarians saying something grammatical and saying it grammatically, though Tristram and Ulrich have exceptional ideas about grammar.48 They are whimsical epitomes of rationality and their structuring principles acquire modal nuances. This definition of life lays bare what H. White calls the constitutive concepts engrained in an historian’s consciousness and prefiguring the historical field. With their self-reflexive style, both novels attain an immanent transparency juggling opinions over autonomy’s slackline.

2.4 A necessary digression: truthful mental life in a biographical account 2.4.1 Truth with autonomy are the parables of fools and idealists in Kakania 2.4.1.1 Truth and autonomy In Tristram Shandy and Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, fictional minds must find their way around different obstacles if they wish to express their thoughts or give them a definite form. What the protagonists live is filtered through thought patterns that standardize experiences and convey them in a language that might turn them into the Same, into an image grounded in a concept or a unifying framework, which nevertheless allows them to interact. For Ulrich, this is an impersonal experience embedded in a broader social environment where different agents will possibly come to the same conclusions. The environment nourishes our world image and reveals how it is partly handed down and does not originate in an individual. Autonomy is thus endangered by the role of attributes as functions and by tradition. Hence, to find out what is authentically mine and become who I am, I should relinquish attributes and embrace attributelessness.49 At the same time, this consideration depends on the broader and sometimes ambiguous definition || 48 Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, trans. David Ross (London: Oxford University Press, 1969 [1925]), 34, (1105a17-b5). What can be considered as an Aristotelian definition of rationality grounded in an ethos: “A man will be a grammarian, then, only when he has both said something grammatical and said it grammatically; and this means doing it in accordance with the grammatical knowledge in himself.” 49 v. Heydebrand, Die Reflexionen Ulrichs, 11, 134.

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that Ulrich gives to Moral. In her pioneer work on Musil’s œuvre, Heydebrand explains that, by moral, Ulrich understands, on the one hand, all the imaginable representations, judgments, feelings and actions that escape the natural sciences’ scope and the most common thought patterns and rules, such as historical sways and changes, styles, tastes, and sensations. On the other, moral also refers to norms and precepts affecting social life.50 Between these extremes lies autonomy’s nuisance. When prescriptions merge with the virtually possible, the result is an event that turns out to be seinesgleichen, an average situation, an expected result that does not deviate from the mean. According to Ulrich, events and individuals will fall into mediocrity, but more important is that the Durchschnitt – a concept borrowed from probability theory – interconnects the most common or remote possibilities with prosaic reality.51 Within this framework, an individual’s quest for autonomy does not reside in putting into practice their authentic opinions, thereby changing the world. Chthonic powers and heroes were superseded in Ulrich’s world by the bourgeoise and its quotidian life, so a direct attack on a system might seem futile, but manipulating an ethos and how it sees the world provides an alternative by which to grasp the difference in the same. More precisely, it enables us to grasp the difference in a projected reproduction or repetition that produces the same. Alongside repetition, there are endless possibilities in the practical field and in the environment that invite us to consider any act as folly in comparison to better possibilities that were betrayed. In view of this, autonomy is the task that seeks to change the regularity with which the world unfolds before our eyes. Therein falls Ulrich’s struggle against causality as the main tool to describe the world. For this alternative conception, causes look suspicious and motives are inaccessible and tainted by tradition,52 so, for Ulrich, probability theory, along || 50 v. Heydebrand, Die Reflexionen Ulrichs, 8. 51 v. Heydebrand argues that language and patterns of actions, both bequeathed on us, neutralize the particularities of any given event, and traces back the reflections upon seinesgleichen and Durschnitt to Nietzsche’s philosophy and probability. Furthermore, she mentions constraints on action that can be considered “internal”, like the mind’s mechanisms. v. Heydebrand, Die Reflexionen Ulrichs, 11–18. 52 “Indem Ulrich durch seine provozierende Formulierung den philosophischen Satz vom zureichenden Grund im ‘persönlichen’ und im ‘öffentlichen-geschichtlichen Leben’ nicht gelten lässt, deutet er zugleich an, dass man von menschlichen Handlungen vielleicht gar keine strenge Motiviertheit erwarten darf. Die Kausalität hat im menschlichen Leben offenbar nicht die Bedeutung, die sie bei einer Reihe von Naturvorgängen besitzt, und es ist ein Fehler, dass man sich bisher das Zustandekommen von Grundsätzen, Entscheidungen und Taten gerade in Analogie zu solchen kausalmechanischen Vorgängen vorgestellt hat.” v. Heydebrand, Die Reflexionen Ulrichs, 14.

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with Ernst Mach’s Gestalt psychology, might provide a better picture of our situation in this world. Ulrich’s attack against free will and the programmatic function of attributelessness is rooted in Mach’s discussion on perception, knowledge and subject. Here, the truth value of “I” and objects play a crucial role. For Mach, says Heydebrand, “[haben] diese Fiktionen […] allerdings im täglichen Leben einen berechtigten Orientierungswert, und ebenso die vereinfachte Anschauung, dass Menschen und Dinge in Ursache-Wirkungs-Verhältnissen zueinander stehen.”53 Truth has a pragmatic value, it is a mistake we believe in for a simple reason: “Weil die Menschen so sehr das Feste suchen, erheben sie Meinungen schnell zu Dogmen und verleihen noch dem Ungewissesten die Würde der Wahrheit.”54 But the precarious status of a truth does not mean that the reflections in the novel are trying to expose fallacies and errors. Changes in history begin with misconceptions and Ulrich, who cannot keep up with his times or perhaps suffers for taking them seriously: Er vergalt es seiner Zeit damit, daß er die Ursache der geheimnisvollen Veränderungen, die ihre Krankheit bildeten, indem sie das Genie aufzehrten, für ganz gewöhnliche Dummheit hielt. Durchaus nicht in einem beleidigenden Sinn. Denn wenn die Dummheit nicht von innen dem Talent zum Verwechseln ähnlich sehen würde, wenn sie außen nicht als Fortschritt, Genie, Hoffnung, Verbesserung erscheinen könnte, würde wohl niemand dumm sein wollen, und es würde keine Dummheit geben. Zumindest wäre es sehr leicht, sie zu bekämpfen. (MoE 58)

Stupidity moves the world, and as cousin of madness reminds us of the lost epic times and their heroic deeds which ended with Moosbrugger and Erasmian folly.55 Stupidity is kin to the epic and its founding power, but in an unstable world this power should be taken with a grain of salt. As history’s catalyst, stupidity cannot be avoided, but it confronts us with an ambiguous situation, that is, the same situation brought about by Asininity.56 In a similar vein, Ulrich sees || 53 v. Heydebrand, Die Reflexionen Ulrichs, 23–24. For Nietzsche’s influence on Musil’s writings and this issue, see 38. 54 v. Heydebrand, Die Reflexionen Ulrichs, 37. 55 Erasmus, Das Lob der Torheit, 54. “Und doch – hier wachsen die Heldentaten, wie sie gar manche gewandte Feder verherrlicht; diese Torheit gründet Staaten, von ihr lebt jede Obrigkeit, lebt die Kirche, leben Feldherren, Räte und Richter – das ganze Treiben der Menschen ist ein Spiel der Torheit.” 56 “car Dieu a élu les choses sans force pour confondre les forces du monde. Il a mis en honneur les sottises, car ce que la sagesse ne pouvait restituer, la sainte sottise et la sainte ignorance l’ont rétabli : ainsi la sagesse des sages est-elle réprouvée, la prudence des prudents

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in stupidity a creative, innovative, pliant ability that can enthrone an idea as truth: “Es gibt schlechterdings keinen bedeutenden Gedanken, den die Dummheit nicht anzuwenden verstünde, sie ist allseitig beweglich und kann alle Kleider der Wahrheit anziehen. Die Wahrheit dagegen hat jeweils nur ein Kleid und einen Weg und ist immer im Nachteil” (MoE 59). One can arbitrarily choose an idea, which the environment will happily provide, and orientate his actions around it. This is how the world became rife with spurious truths, whereas Truth is almost nowhere to be found. In a world of functions and systems, truth is relegated. After Ulrich arrives at this point in his reflections, the narrator underscores his presence and the fact that he is focalizing Ulrich, who, as a character endowed with a spontaneous mind, starts digressing. His associations, however, are not as unrelated with the matter at hand as the narrator would want us to believe: Nach einer Weile hatte Ulrich aber in Verbindung damit einen wunderlichen Einfall. Er stellte sich vor, der große Kirchenphilosoph Thomas von Aquino, gestorben 1274, nachdem er die Gedanken seiner Zeit unsäglich mühevoll in beste Ordnung gebracht hatte, wäre damit noch gründlicher in die Tiefe gegangen und soeben erst fertig geworden; nun trat er, durch besondere Gnade jung geblieben, mit vielen Folianten unter dem Arm aus seiner rundbogigen Haustür, und eine Elektrische sauste ihm an der Nase vorbei. (MoE 59)

The Doctor universalis, famous for his definition of truth as adaequatio rei et intellectus, is presented here as an immortal equipped with folios that seem just as outdated as his definition of truth. To Aquinas’ astonishment – at least probably in Ulrich’s imagination – the famous phrase in his folio has been swept away by an electric tram, by energy and systems that do not behave exactly like objects and are not so easy to manipulate. This new panorama encourages Ulrich to think about truth in relation to the functions that govern his world. Truth has been demoted to “true”, a binding function used to fasten together ideas and convictions. “True” is an attribute employed to bring about something, to produce an outcome in the world. It represents a pragmatic compro-

|| rejetée. Ce sont les sots de ce monde qui ont fondé la religion, les cérémonies, la loi, la foi et la règle de vie. Les plus grands ânes du monde…” Bruno, Cabale du cheval pégaséen, 32, 34. And still, Asininity does not hinder the quest for truth: “J’ai suffisamment montré que, sous l’éminence de la vérité, nous n’avons rien de plus éminent que l’ignorance et l’asinité : car l’asinité est le moyen par lequel la sagesse s’unit à la vérité et l’apprivoise, et il n’y a aucune autre vertu capable d’occuper la pièce attenante, mur à mur, à celle de la vérité. Etant donné que l’intellect humain a quelque accès à la vérité, comme cet accés nese fait ni par la science ni par la connaissance, il fuat nécessairament qu’il se fasse par l’ignorance et l’asinité.” (124)

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mise pinned at will onto ideas or, as Ulrich tells his grieved friend Leo Fischel, a catalyst for change: “Sie wollen mich nicht verstehn. Ich weiß, was Fortschritt ist, ich weiß was Österreich ist, und ich weiß wahrscheinlich auch, was Vaterlandsliebe ist. Aber vielleicht vermag ich mir, was wahre Vaterlandsliebe, wahres Österreich und wahrer Fortschritt ist, nicht ganz richtig vorzustellen. Und um das frage ich Sie!” “Gut; wissen Sie, was ein Enzym oder was ein Katalysator ist?” Leo Fischel hob nur abwehrend die Hand. “Das trägt materiell nichts bei, aber es setzt die Geschehnisse in Gang. Sie müssen aus der Geschichte wissen, daß es den wahren Glauben, die wahre Sittlichkeit und die wahre Philosophie niemals gegeben hat; dennoch haben die Kriege, Gemeinheiten und Gehässigkeiten, die ihretwegen entfesselt worden sind, die Welt fruchtbar umgestaltet.” (MoE 134)

The contingency engrained in contemporary experience can be overcome, though only partially, by means of a truth that is not substantive and, consequently, by accepting that in our real or “persönliches Leben und in unserem öffentlich-geschichtlichen geschieht immer das, was eigentlich keinen rechten Grund hat” (MoE 134). Instead of presupposing the principle of sufficient reason, Ulrich urges us to construe life on the basis of the principle of insufficient reason. True is an appendage independent of the truth in the sense of a factualcausal origin of events, so a thinker should abandon his search for the key to the realm of truth and rather concentrate its efforts on the potentiality of true, on how “trues” are realized: “‘Ich schwöre Ihnen,’ erwiderte Ulrich ernst ‘daß weder ich noch irgend jemand weiß, was der, die, das Wahre ist; aber ich kann Ihnen versichern, daß es im Begriff steht, verwirklicht zu werden!’” (MoE 135) True is what propels ideas into reality. With his conclusion, Ulrich is elaborating, from a different perspective, a concern expressed by the banker, Leo Fischel. In a previous scene, the bank director claimed to be filled with awe every time he heard the word “true” characterizing a substantive. However, in his reflections, the substantive Warheit never appears, and the closest grammatical form to truth would be the substantivized adjective das Wahre. But even this form discomfits Leo Fischel, who prefers to commit to opinions by calling them convictions, as in the Überzeugung which every person acquires in his or her area of expertise (MoE 135). Although it would be farfetched to claim that, in this context, an opinion held to be true and a conviction are synonyms, there is a link between them. The question of how motifs converge or drift away from each other semantically, thereby revealing diverse facets, is part of Musil’s exuberant style and essayistic variations that weave through complex discussions.

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In Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, scattered words hint at the interconnection between thematic cores. Motifs are reactivated and approached through different semantic fields. Diverse stances are concatenated in a stylistic movement, in a rotating process whose forces are twofold. The centripetal one thrusts ideas towards the center creating an evanescent core, sketching an outline of subject-matter that vanishes when movement stops; simultaneously, the centrifugal force refuses to integrate variations into a homogeneous mass and jettisons each idea in a singular direction that progressively distances itself from its original neighbors. Ideas might originate in contiguous points of the circumference, but their resemblance grows distant when one follows their trajectory. In this case, conviction alludes to the Kraft einer Überzeugung and therefore links the discussion of truth as catalyst to the old worldview. However, this motif serves as a coda for chapter 35 and, at the same time, as an anacrusis for the next chapter. Now, by expanding the analysis to the previous chapter (34), one stumbles across a passage preannouncing the topic through the motif of architectural styles, which stand for models of life. On a walk, Ulrich is pondering as usual. When he sees the houses around him, he gives form to one of his recurrent ideas, that is, that both the vestiges of the past and their style reflect an image of the world. In that moment, he also remembers his old friends, once rebels who made a successful career, partook in progress, and now live in those houses. “Sie waren auf einem mehr oder weniger kurzen Weg aus dem Nebel ins Erstarren gelangt, und deshalb wird die Geschichte von ihnen gelegentlich der Schilderung ihres Jahrhunderts einst melden: Anwesend waren…“ (MoE 132–133) Mist is a recurrent metaphor thoroughly discussed in Musil scholarship and linked to the problem of autonomy. For instance, Lilith Jappe argues that the mist, together with the image of a cold wall, represent how continuity in history is grounded, as well as how the Self constitutes itself.57 The undifferentiated mist condenses against the cold walls of actuality in the same manner that the Self liquifies when it selects and employs an attribute, as if this Self were slipping down the face of the wall and precipitating into the factual. But no matter how imposing this containing wall might appear to the meaningless buffeting of a mist, in the long run, phantasy changes actuality. The immaterial whimsical convictions of a mist can corrode and

|| 57 Lilith Jappe, Selbstkonstitution bei Robert Musil und in der Psychoanalyse. Identität und Wirklichkeit im Mann ohne Eigenschaften (München: Fink, 2011), 14. “‘Selbstkonstitution’ wird als die Bildung des Selbst aus und in dem dialektischen Zusammenspiel von Selbst und Wirklichkeit und im Sinne einer Abgrenzung verstanden, in der das Selbst sich von der Welt unterscheidet und zu ihr in Bezug setzt.” For the relation to actuality, see 76–83, 238.

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imperceptibly dent the wall, or at least propitiate the growth of moss, a chthonic veneer that alters surfaces and can penetrate into a stone’s innermost layers. A phantasy that can instil itself into actuality is what drives the multiperspectivism that surfaced during the analysis of Moosbrugger’s trial. In this case, the ideas and notions floating around do not lead to the Eichenkatze, a solipsistic naming discussed in the previous chapter. Instead, they are turned into progress by those former rebels that became rigid. No matter how unique and exceptional a perspective might appear, it still hinges on a cultural environment that offers life to ideas.58 The dynamic entailed in the contact between mist and wall can also be identified in character construction, which reveals idiosyncrasies like the General’s militaristic socialization and Arnheim’s capitalistic and encroaching personality. Both adopt specific thought patterns and have internalized them, but in their conversations, ideas start repeating in different contexts and are sometimes appropriated by diverse characters that modulate them with their different styles. In short, there is a constant cross contamination. More importantly, Ulrich and Fischel meet accidentally but still have similar concerns, concerns that seem to be in the Kakanian air before the first world war, but never lead to an agreement or conviction. Conversations in Musil’s novel are comparable to Shandean communication due to the narrow space for understanding. Although the novel lacks the Shandean comic overtones, in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften narrator and characters collude. They attempt to convey the convoluted life of the mind by showing and telling, so they can produce a thinking person between the personal and impersonal ideas, and reveal the rich cultural contrast against which the attributeless Self collides.59 But when it collides, it loses autonomy. For this reason, one should constantly be in motion, since “was diese Renoviersucht des Daseins zu einem Perpetuum mobile macht, ist nichts als das Ungemach, daß zwischen

|| 58 Jappe, Selbstkonstitution bei Robert Musil, 55. “Ähnliches lässt sich von den Gedanken sagen. Sie aktualisieren sich zwar im einzelnen Denken, ihr Inhalt aber ist überpersönlich und gehört nicht dem einzelnen Denkenden an. Ein Gedanke wird zwar individuell vollzogen und persönlich erlebt, sei aber seiner Gestalt nach nichts der Person ‘Eigenes’, sondern bilde sich aus den verschiedenen Ideen und Gedanken, die in einer Zeit kursierten.” For the interrelationship between ideas and style, see 71, 54. 59 Jappe, Selbstkonstitution bei Robert Musil, 51, 65. A similar reading is advanced by Honold, Die Stadt und der Krieg, 289. “Das ziellose Schlendern führt zu dem Topos schlechthin, der die digressive Struktur des Romans auf allen Ebenen wieder einzufangen ersucht – zur Eigenschaftslosigkeit. Soll diese Eigenschaftslosigkeit erzählt werden, bedarf es eines kontrastierenden Umfelds, auf dem sie sich ‘niederschlägt’ wie der Hauch des gestaltlosen Ich an den erkalteten Wänden.”

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dem nebelhaften eigenen und dem schon zur fremden Schale erstarrten Ich der Vorgänger wieder nur ein Schein-Ich, eine ungefähr passende Gruppenseele eingeschoben wird” (MoE 132). Autonomy resides in movement and ideas are predestined to be forgotten, to turn staid and irrelevant, or become the ideas, “[die] ein alter Narr verficht, der von seinen fünfzig Bewunderern der große Soundso genannt wird” (MoE 132). 2.4.1.2 The fool, the idealist, and the Möglichkeitsmensch Let us suppose that an idea has not become stale, that it still promises a bright future. In that moment, its champions would be held in high esteem and “wenn man sie loben will, nennt man diese Narren auch Idealisten, aber offenbar ist mit alledem nur ihre schwache Spielart erfaßt, welche die Wirklichkeit nicht begreifen kann oder ihr wehleidig ausweicht, wo also das Fehlen des Wirklichkeitssinns wirklich einen Mangel bedeutet” (MoE 16). Both idealists and fools are “possibilitarians” (MwQ 12), Möglichkeitsmenschen that live like dreamers, madmen, and children in a “subjunctive” reality. This type of person represents a link between the Moosbrugger complex and the motif of the fool as history’s main agent, so grappling with the Möglichkeitssinn that drives this person should lead to a better understanding of Musil’s narrative reflections on truth and thought. In contrast to being guided by a “sense of reality,” which explains the reasons behind the existing state of affairs and grounds actions with Daseinsberechtigung (MoE 16), the possibilitarians are never convinced of their operational premises. As the logical counterpart of people endowed with a sense of reality, they are not biased while judging the world and would never prefer the real over other unrealizable or imaginary settings. This fundamental drive expands its scope beyond the factually possible and the probable and reaches the imaginable. The Möglichkeitssinn emphasizes the role of the imagination in private and public life. A person with this ability “sagt beispielsweise nicht: Hier ist dies oder das geschehen, wird geschehen, muß geschehen; sondern er erfindet: Hier könnte, sollte oder müßte geschehn“ (MoE 16). This distinction rescues the possible from the grasp of the advancing positivistic method of statistics. The modal distinction between the probable and the subjunctive, between events that mathematical models make us expect and the paradoxical idea of a “possible necessity” frees ideas from reality’s fetters. Under this light, asininity and folly are potentialized and their creative force becomes overwhelming thanks to a simple decision: Inaction. Such is the rea-

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son behind Ulrich’s “Urlaub vom Leben,” a liminal passivity that is also productive: So ließe sich der Möglichkeitssinn geradezu als die Fähigkeit definieren, alles, was ebensogut sein könnte, zu denken und das, was ist, nicht wichtiger zu nehmen als das, was nicht ist. Man sieht, daß die Folgen solcher schöpferischen Anlage bemerkenswert sein können, und bedauerlicherweise lassen sie nicht selten das, was die Menschen bewundern, falsch erscheinen und das, was sie verbieten, als erlaubt oder wohl auch beides als gleichgültig. (MoE 16)

To adopt a possibilitarian attitude entails much more than imagining all possible scenarios. It is not only an intellectual exercise but an exercise of the will, so it is an “aktiver Passivismus” (MoE 356). Theoretically, the lack of compromise with an image of the world would put us in all possible worlds simultaneously, which would render any action impossible since it seems quite unlikely to find a decision relating to all worlds at the same time and promising an analogously desirable outcome. Moreover, this conjecture implies moral skepticism. The ruling set of values might be different in each image, and goals might be unthinkable or inscrutable in the present: “Das Mögliche umfaßt jedoch nicht nur die Träume nervenschwacher Personen, sondern auch die noch nicht erwachten Absichten Gottes. Ein mögliches Erlebnis oder eine mögliche Wahrheit sind nicht gleich wirklichem Erlebnis und wirklicher Wahrheit weniger dem Werte des Wirklichseins, sondern sie haben, wenigstens nach Ansicht ihrer Anhänger, etwas sehr Göttliches in sich“ (MoE 16). Possibilities outstrip the probable grounded in the factual, science and a monolithic intelligibility. The sense of possibility is therefore the skill needed to delve into the diverse principles that serve as basis for an image of the world. In the coda of this train of thought, the Möglichkeitssinn acquires an unsurmountable dimension. There, Ulrich remembers an essay written in his school years, a composition that got him expelled. The expulsion – together with the impertinent comment that took him to the precinct and the scene where he is beaten up without defending himself because he was thinking about the course of action – 60 all these experiences reveal the limits of Ulrich’s reluctance to act. || 60 “Die drei Köpfe waren plötzlich vor ihm gestanden; er mochte in der spät-einsamen Straße einen der Männer gestreift haben, denn seine Gedanken waren zerstreut und mit etwas anderem beschäftigt gewesen, aber diese Gesichter waren schon vorbereitet auf Zorn und traten verzerrt in den Kreis der Laterne. Da hatte er einen Fehler begangen. Er hätte sofort zurückprallen müssen, als fürchte er sich, und dabei fest mit dem Rücken gegen den Kerl stoßen, der hinter ihn getreten war, oder mit dem Ellenbogen gegen seinen Magen, und noch im selben

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They represent an “Ohrfeige”, testing his commitment to possibilitarianism, since a possibilitarian is characteristically unpractical: Ein unpraktischer Mann — und so erscheint er nicht nur, sondern ist er auch — bleibt unzuverlässig und unberechenbar im Verkehr mit Menschen. Er wird Handlungen begehen, die ihm etwas anderes bedeuten als anderen, aber beruhigt sich über alles, sobald es sich in einer außerordentlichen Idee zusammenfassen läßt. Und zudem ist er heute von Folgerichtigkeit noch weit entfernt. Es ist etwa sehr leicht möglich, daß ihm ein Verbrechen, bei dem ein anderer zu Schaden kommt, bloß als eine soziale Fehlleistung erscheint, an der nicht der Verbrecher die Schuld trägt, sondern die Einrichtung der Gesellschaft. Fraglich ist es dagegen, ob ihm eine Ohrfeige, die er selbst empfängt, als eine Schmach der Gesellschaft oder wenigstens so unpersönlich wie der Biß eines Hundes vorkommen werde; wahrscheinlich wird er da zuerst die Ohrfeige erwidern und danach die Auffassung haben, daß er das nicht hätte tun sollen. (MoE 17–18)

But Ulrich reacts contrary to expectations and instead of responding with a slap he fails to act, although not by virtue of internalized Christian precepts. He is not turning the other cheek, nor does he blame society or the criminal, but is always distracted and hesitant. Ulrich, like the unpractical man described above, lives without conviction. He can never be convinced of the importance of a cause. He behaves like a true possibilitarian who, even in the face of danger, is prompted by reflection into stagnation. Ulrich is a martyr of the subjunctive. For instance, in the essay that got him expelled, he displays patriotism and piety. He had the best intentions, but was misunderstood. The problem was the closing argument: “daß wahrscheinlich auch Gott von seiner Welt am liebsten im Conjunctivus potentialis spreche (hic dixerit quispiam = hier könnte einer einwenden…), denn Gott macht die Welt und denkt dabei, es könnte ebensogut anders sein” (MoE 19). For Ulrich, a true patriot would never claim that his land is the best, instead he should deem every aspect as perfectible.

|| Augenblick trachten müssen, zu entwischen, denn gegen drei starke Männer gibt es kein Kämpfen. Statt dessen hatte er einen Augenblick gezögert. Das machte das Alter; seine zweiunddreißig Jahre, Feindseligkeit und Liebe brauchen da schon etwas mehr Zeit. Er wollte nicht glauben, daß die drei Antlitze, die ihn mit einemmal in der Nacht mit Zorn und Verachtung anblickten, es nur auf sein Geld abgesehen hatten, sondern gab sich dem Gefühl hin, daß da Haß gegen ihn zusammengeströmt und zu Gestalten geworden war; und während die Strolche ihn schon mit gemeinen Worten beschimpften, freute ihn der Gedanke, daß es vielleicht gar keine Strolche seien, sondern Bürger wie er, bloß etwas angetrunken und von Hemmungen befreit” (MoE 25–26).

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The extent to which this anecdote resembles some aspects of the life and work of G. Bruno is striking and can help us advance further arguments regarding the humanist facet in Musil’s thought. Like Ulrich, the Nolan was contending with a conception of his times. He criticised the Aristotelian roots of theology, in particular the physics, and wanted thereby to praise god but ended in the hands of the inquisition. Although an encounter with the inquisition is a worse fate than being expelled from school, there are still further similarities to consider. With his philosophy, the Nolan indirectly denied the divine hierarchies grounded in Aristoteles’ unmoved mover. He proposed an immanent conception where the divine principle intrinsic to all worlds and things represents an independent motor. In this conception, there is still an unmoved creator, but one who is never present and only breathed life into all beings. Moreover, since the creator’s goodness and power are limitless, he must have had the limitless goodness of creating an infinite number of worlds, each with a center and an inner motor, that is, a substance independent from any attribute propelling all things and giving them their form, a form that results from the interaction between the passive and active principle enmeshed in vicissitudes. Time brings change; mutability is the condition of the world, for only the first principle can be immovable.61 In a similar vein, Ulrich’s world is multipolar. One can discover diverse perspectives affecting each other, but none of them can win the upper hand or persuade the rest of society and establish a consensus. Without a state of affairs accessible to everybody, without assuming a single divine origin to which we could trace everything back, cartography has become a complex endeavor. Objects in the world are prone to change, and each perspective represents a gravitational center. That is why Clarisse urges Ulrich to convince Graf Leinsdorf to realize a Nietzsche year, or an Ulrich year, or maybe a “Your” year, and asks: “Hast du noch nie beobachtet, daß jeder Mensch im Mittelpunkt einer Himmelskugel steht? Wenn er von seinem Platz weggeht, geht sie mit” (MoE 353). This image is the crux of the issue and leads to the already mentioned “aktiver Passivismus”, as well as to characterizing Ulrich as a criminal, because we are accountable for how we render the world intelligible: “Gewähren lassen

|| 61 Giordano Bruno, De l’infini, de l’univers et des Mondes, Œuvres complètes IV, trans. JeanPierre Cavaillé, Text established by Giovanni Aquilecchia, notes Jean Seidengart, intr. Miguel Angel Granada (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1995). For god’s infinite potency and good, see 89. For the inner principle in relation to the first principle, see 99, 101. For the attack on hierarchy, see 257–256. For the inner principle defined as without attributes, see 275. For the immanent universal motor, see 337.

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ist zehnmal gefählicher als Tun!” (MoE 356) But more important is that this image might have thrust Ulrich into imaginary realms that are unbounded, like god’s powers. This conclusion is preannounced at the end of the chapter with a bold remark: “‘Jetzt werde ich dir erzählen, warum ich nichts tue’ begann er und schwieg” (MoE 357). This cliffhanger certainly raises expectations and promises the key to Ulrich’s behavior. But the narrator assumes an authoritative stance and resumes the discussion thusly: “Was hätte Ulrich eigentlich Clarisse sagen können?” (MoE 357). With this introduction, the narrator disappoints the readers who wished for a direct answer. Since a blatant response would probably clip a possibilitarian’s wings, the narrator complies with the sense of possibility and sets off with a question in a past tense subjunctive with a modal verb. In this manner, the narrator avoids any assertive claim and nuances with ambiguity the following speculation: “Gott meint die Welt keineswegs wörtlich; sie ist ein Bild, eine Analogie, eine Redewendung, deren er sich aus irgendwelchen Gründen bedienen muß, und natürlich immer unzureichend; wir dürfen ihn nicht beim Wort nehmen, wir selbst müssen die Losung herausbekommen, die er uns aufgibt” (MoE 357–358). God created countless perceivable facets and it is our duty, according to Ulrich’s essay, to actively seek the possible best instead of settling for literal meaning. In the novel, the infinite potency related to God’s goodness is a principle that is not limited to the ever-expanding space in which the infinite worlds reside, but also concerns morality, the layers of meaning that an object could have, and the heterogeneous perceptions which ground the modes or perspectives upon which motives, reasons and ends are built. The openness to a new palette of modes explains the difference between statistics and the possibilitarian’s view. It is not only a matter of probability or necessity but also of insignificant differences. One must discern the nuances between events that ought, should and could happen. As a consequence, the factual is deposed by modal variegation; true propositions surrender their primacy and are not the only available modal dyes that serve to explain the world or provide reasons for action. The diverse mental contents adopted to guide behaviour do not need to satisfy a truth criterion. However, it would be a mistake to place all modal possibilities on the same level. Although no idea can be so convincing as to become the motor of our actions, these different mental contents are not on equal footing, for the Möglichkeitssinn is grounded in their difference. To favor any idea would pervert the purpose of this attitude. Definitive solutions are unavailable, but there is always a path to follow to get close to an answer: “Aber er hatte noch etwas auf der Zunge gehabt; etwas von mathemati-

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schen Aufgaben, die keine allgemeine Lösung zulassen, wohl aber Einzellösungen, durch deren Kombination man sich der allgemeinen Lösung nähert. Er hätte hinzufügen können, daß er die Aufgabe des menschlichen Lebens für eine solche ansah” (MoE 358). Contrary to what we could expect from mathematics taken at face value, it is open to unresolvedness and even to incessantly adding up calculations to set the contours of a general solution. And that is the way, according to Ulrich, we should construe our life and history. If the system changes constantly and the meaning of an action adapts to fluctuations, then contingency cannot be overcome by instating continuity with false – but maybe necessary – attempts: Was man ein Zeitalter nennt — ohne zu wissen, ob man Jahrhunderte, Jahrtausende oder die Spanne zwischen Schule und Enkelkind darunter verstehen soll —, dieser breite, ungeregelte Fluß von Zuständen würde dann ungefähr ebensoviel bedeuten wie ein planloses Nacheinander von ungenügenden und einzeln genommen falschen Lösungsversuchen, aus denen, erst wenn die Menschheit sie zusammenzufassen verstünde, die richtige und totale Lösung hervorgehen könnte. (MoE 358)

A society’s or person’s life are experiences that behave analogously as a macroand microcosm with contingency at their core. So, to think that a progression or development resembles a line which, point after point, would lead to a solution is a mere presupposition that disregards the broader scheme, revealed when we see every line as just a partial solution. Besides hinting at contingency, partial solutions are also intertwined with an opinion’s truth and its function as catalyst, which is linked to the potency that propels the possibilitarians and entails different modal layers. These topics are grounded in the experience of the manifoldness of the world, to which one should add the processes developing at each moment one is thinking. Ideas and opinions also represent images that remain silent about parts of the mental life that could not prevail, were disregarded or even repressed: Ob der Mensch nur seinen Affekten folgt, nur das tut, fühlt, ja sogar denkt, wozu ihn unbewußte Ströme des Verlangens oder die sanftere Brise der Lust treiben, wie man heute annimmt? Ob er nicht doch eher der Vernunft und dem Willen folgt, — wie man gleichfalls heute annimmt? Ob er bestimmten Affekten besonders folgt, so dem geschlechtlichen, wie man heute annimmt? Oder doch nicht vor allem dem geschlechtlichen, sondern der psychologischen Wirkung wirtschaftlicher Bedingungen, wie man gleichfalls heute annimmt? Man kann ein so verwickeltes Gebilde, wie er es ist, von vielen Seiten ansehn und im theoretischen Bild das oder jenes als Achse wählen: es entstehen Teilwahrheiten, aus deren gegenseitiger Durchdringung langsam die Wahrheit höher wächst: Wächst sie aber

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wirklich höher? Es hat sich noch jedesmal gerächt, wenn man eine Teilwahrheit für das allein Gültige angesehen hat. Anderseits wäre man aber kaum zu dieser Teilwahrheit gelangt, hätte man sie nicht überschätzt. (MoE 1020)

These intimate reflections, appearing in a context in which Ulrich shifts the focus towards feelings and the mystical experience, show the concerns that I have pointed out here and in previous parts of this study. A global image of the mental life is what interests Ulrich. To choose an opinion, to take a side that complies with a theoretical framework, it is necessary to find a partial solution. This might not take us a step further. And at the end we will discover that we overestimated an idea whose validity we never doubted before: we were either Idealists or fools. 2.4.1.3 The fool, the idealist, and Gleichnis In Musil’s novel, imaginative persons like the fool or idealist make use of the Gleichnis, a motif that conciliates mathematics with a roaming mental life. Ulrich’s passion for mathematics hinges on his interest in living and experiencing a method instead of applying it or providing it with a content.62 But there is more than one method to consider, since different approaches can lead to partial solutions. Each one is related to the diverse career paths, or designs for living, adopted by Ulrich, such as his attempts to lead a life empirically according to trial and error, or poetically as if he were a literary character. This fluctuation between frameworks hints at a solution’s inherent partiality and defines the Gleichnis as a given fluidity whose unquenchable energy turns the novel into a perpetual motion machine. As a literary genre, the parable links metaphysical premises with a narrative treatment, a relationship widely thematised by Musil scholars. Some aspects of this discussion will help to elaborate on Ulrich’s and Tristram’s comparable stance to Humanism, because the parable determines the inner form of the novel. “Form” stands for both the narrative’s compositional principles and, in a different context, for the totality of life.63 However, the parable motif entails a conflict between totality and manifoldness. || 62 “Wenn man statt wissenschaftlicher Anschauungen Lebensanschauung setzen würde, statt Hypothese Versuch und statt Wahrheit Tat, so gäbe es kein Lebenswerk eines ansehnlichen Naturforschers oder Mathematikers, das an Mut und Umsturzkraft nicht die größten Taten der Geschichte weit übertreffen würde” (MoE 40). 63 Jörg Kühne, Das Gleichnis. Studien zur inneren Form von Robert Musils Roman Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1968), 62.

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The parable is always on the verge of consolidating, in the act of living, an Erleben whose richness cannot be expressed in one simple form of experience.64 It alludes to the heterogeneous sides of reality and to the contrast between an immanent and a transcendental approach. On the one hand, there is totality and nothingness, which are opposed in the same continuum and might be bridged through the mystical experience. This transcendental instrumentalization of the Gleichnis implies a dimension accessible to divine intellects or to a Reason cleansed from its determinant traits and left as pure fluidity, open to simultaneously embracing all sides of reality. On the other, Gleichnis refers to the act of producing knowledge and assumes diverse forms or functions. It can be an illustration, a rhetoric or a hermeneutic device, so it is a selection and simultaneously a “synthesis and integration” of life’s facets.65 The motif of the parable gravitates around the Moosbrugger complex as well as the anderer Zustand, and it emphasizes the thinking process.66 The novel’s meta-reflections characterize the parable as a textual device that can convey the experience of a man thinking, the tension towards the anderen Zustand, but “ohne ihn damit erschöpfend darstellen zu können.”67 Although present at the beginning of the process that leads to it, the parable is opposed to the “scientific” perspective with its statistic calculations that subsume variations under a common denominator and dissipate any differences, leaving in our hands a stable concept or conviction by which to manipulate the world.68 The parable is defined in opposition to the motif of Seinesgleichen ge-

|| 64 Kühne, Das Gleichnis, VII, 5, 62, 145–146. For Kühne, Mach’s Gestalt concept helps to anchor the unmeasurable richness of life in the act of experiencing. The lived becomes a static reduction when it takes the form of the experienced. In this respect, Kühne quotes W. Rasch to claim that the form is the crucial problem dealt with by the novel. For totality, see 49, 88; for its contrasting relation to immanence, see 67, 86. 65 Kühne, Das Gleichnis, 13. For the further functions here mentioned, see also 7–8. 66 “Das aber bedeutet, dass es beim Gleichnis gar nicht primär um eine Darstellung des ‘anderen Zustands’ geht, sondern mehr noch um seine Herstellung. Das Gleichnis zu rezipieren, heißt, einen Augenblick des ‘anderen Zustands’ zu erleben.” (Gess, “Expeditionen im Mann ohne Eigenschaften…”, 19) “Die Bewegung von der Expedition zum Selbst-Experiment löst sich hier von der Problematik der regressiven Mimesis, die von Musil als primitivistisch kritisiert wird, und führt zum Selbst-Experiment als reflektiertem, gegenwartsbezogenen Umgang mit dem entfremdeten Eigenen.” (22) 67 v. Heydebrand, Die Reflexionen Ulrichs, 88. 68 Mülder-Bach, Robert Musil, 314. “Die Gewalt der Reproduktion, die der Roman unter dem Titel ‘Seinesgleichen geschieht’ verhandelt, ist das sozioplastische Komplement zum statistischen Gesetz der großen Zahl. Diese Gewalt lässt nicht nur die Einzelfälle in Verteilungskurven und Mittelwerten verschwinden, sie produziert diese Mittelwerte als psychische und soziale

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schieht and being unequivocal: “Eindeutigkeit ist das Gesetz des wachen Denkens und Handelns, das ebenso in einem zwingenden Schluß der Logik wie in dem Gehirn eines Erpressers waltet, der sein Opfer Schritt um Schritt vor sich her drängt, und sie entspringt der Notdurft des Lebens, die zum Untergang führen würde, wenn sich die Verhältnisse nicht eindeutig gestalten ließen” (MoE 593). Unambiguity prevents life from capsizing. It is as necessary as the asininity and folly that persuade one to commit to a specific thought pattern. After accepting some premises, everything acquires clarity, the world presents itself in a pristine image that coerces us into a foreseeable next step. Now, parables represent the opposite of distinct clearness and reproducibility of events, and offer a suitable tool to delve into affects, speculate on the will, give form to desires, and choose a theoretical axis: Das Gleichnis dagegen ist die Verbindung der Vorstellungen, die im Traum herrscht, es ist die gleitende Logik der Seele, der die Verwandtschaft der Dinge in den Ahnungen der Kunst und Religion entspricht; aber auch was es an gewöhnlicher Neigung und Abneigung, Übereinstimmung und Ablehnung, Bewunderung, Unterordnung, Führerschaft, Nachahmung und ihren Gegenerscheinungen im Leben gibt, diese vielfältigen Beziehungen des Menschen zu sich und der Natur, die noch nicht rein sachlich sind und es vielleicht auch nie sein werden, lassen sich nicht anders begreifen als in Gleichnissen. (MoE 593)

The parable can bend the barriers of the factual and reveal its interstices, where speculations on mental life lie. Skepticism in front of a monolithic given is the parable’s motor, and its flexibility resides in assuming reality to be manifold, in being certain that any explanation entails an experience of the multiple and instates a symbolic order, like religion and art, all of which highlight one aspect of this diversity.69 The openness to the multiple entails a neutral position towards the world’s two handles, namely, the metaphorical and the factual. It also paves the way for speculations regarding the supposedly unsolvable conflict between these two

|| Durchschnitte. Sie zerstört das Verhältnis von Gleichheit und Ungleichheit und damit das, was Musil als ‘Gleichnis’ wiederzugewinnen sucht und in Gleichnissen darstellt.” (182) 69 The contraposition between unequivocality and parable is also established by Heydebrand, who places at the parable’s core an “unausdeutbare Lebensgeschehen” (v. Heydebrand, Die Reflexionen Ulrichs, 90, see also 29–30). Although she never mentions the experience of the multiple, her discussion of the novel’s skeptic sway and reality’s interpretability support the argument, since: “Wirklichkeit in dieser Art als Gleichnis zu begreifen, ist eine Form des Möglichkeitssinns, der zur Skepsis gegenüber allem Gegebenen erzieht.” (89) See also 88–93.

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manners of approaching reality.70 Perhaps the disharmony produced by the concatenation of these facets does not lead to an impasse. Rather, it represents a dissonant moment within the complex harmonic progression of the Essayismus, a necessary step in the thinking cadence: “Ohne Zweifel ist das, was man die höhere Humanität nennt, nichts als ein Versuch, diese beiden großen Lebenshälften des Gleichnisses und der Wahrheit miteinander zu verschmelzen, indem man sie zuvor vorsichtig trennt” (MoE 593). Humanity, or perhaps even Humanism as understood by Ulrich, is where the truth, consolidated as a practical necessity, merges with its symbolic order. Their contraposition is temporary. Becoming homogeneous by dissipating the difference between subject and object is what Moosbrugger is capable of and what the mystical experience enables. Gleichnis alludes to a higher category for which truth represents just one version, one facet of a more comprehensive dimension that is beyond the ordering of the world. Parables might grant access to the sphere of truth, but this is only the by-product of a continuous process. They are rather defined by processuality. To strive for rationality through asininity is a necessary process, but the vicissitudes that lead to knowledge do not transit through the pilgrim’s path of progress, nor do they result in the quietude of absolute certitude. The parable construed as a process and not as gateway to truth implies a manifold world that interacts with a mind’s imaginative potential.71 Ambiguity and uncertainty, || 70 For Mülder-Bach, two dimensions might never touch in this conflict, since they represent two realms that cannot come to terms and compromise. “Ungleich schärfer als in den essayistischen Bestimmungen tritt im Roman der affektive Konflikt hervor, die Spannung zwischen einem Selbsterhaltungstrieb, der im Interesse der ‘Notdurft des Lebens’ mit zwingender Konsequenz und Gewalt Trennungen und Vereindeutigungen vornimmt, und den Bindungskräften des Gleichnisses, die in Traum und Kunst vorherrschen und als Denkmodell des Spiels der Neigungen und Abneigungen dienen. Inwiefern dieses ‘gespannte Verhältnis’ die Möglichkeit eröffnet, die ‘beiden Bahnen’ von Liebe und Gewalt ‘zu vereinen’ (593) bleibt vorerst gänzlich offen.” Mülder-Bach, Robert Musil, 345. 71 Whether the Gleichnis stands in Musil’s novel for a yearning for unity in an absolute consciousness or is rather grounded in a world posited as intrinsically diverse, is one of the seminal problems for Musil scholarship but tangential to the present interpretation. Here, its relation to autonomy and leading a life is what makes the parable enticing. The parable’s ambivalent behavior is established by Heydebrand thusly: “Es kann eine anschauliche Verweisung auf einen größeren, nicht ganz fassbaren Zusammenhang bilden, den es in einer bestimmten Hinsicht – das tertium comparationis gibt sie an – zu vergegenwärtigen sucht, ohne ihn damit erschöpfend darstellen zu können.” The parable’s generative power is expressed thusly: “Ein Gleichnis kann aber auch eine anschauliche Verlebendigung eines abstrakten, die volle Wirklichkeit nur einseitig erfassenden Begriffes sein.” v. Heydebrand, Die Reflexionen Ulrichs, 88.

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definiteness and certitude, all define Ulrich’s stroboscopic relation to the world. A parable cannot be easily disassociated from truth, since it implies movement and transformation: Hat man aber an einem Gleichnis alles, was vielleicht wahr sein könnte, von dem getrennt, was nur Schaum ist, so hat man gewöhnlich ein wenig Wahrheit gewonnen und den ganzen Wert des Gleichnisses zerstört; diese Trennung mag darum in der geistigen Entwicklung unvermeidlich gewesen sein, doch hatte sie die gleiche Wirkung wie das Einkochen und Eindicken eines Stoffes, dessen innerste Kräfte und Geister sich während dieses Vorgangs als Dampfwolke davonmachen. Es läßt sich heute manchmal nicht der Eindruck abweisen, daß die Begriffe und Regeln des moralischen Lebens nur ausgekochte Gleichnisse sind, um die ein unerträglich fetter Küchendampf von Humanität wallt […]. (MoE 593–594)

A partial truth can be distilled from a parable in a process that materializes a handle or conviction by which to manipulate the world. It never exhausts all possibilities but transforms them into an ungraspable steam. That is how parables provide the framing structures within which a career or a life can develop. A parable offers a foundation on which to base operational premises to secure our necessities. But at that moment when parables are taken seriously, they lose the richness that springs from the process and allows them to be applicable to diverse contexts and symbolic orders: “Ich will schweigen von den genauen, meß- und definierbaren Eindrücken, aber alle anderen Begriffe, auf die wir unser Leben stützen, sind nichts als erstarren gelassene Gleichnisse. Zwischen wieviel Vorstellungen schwankt und schwebt nicht schon ein so einfacher Begriff wie der von der Männlichkeit” (MoE 574). Beyond the question regarding reproducible values, there are the volatile concepts that become ossified when enacted, which leads Ulrich to this conclusion: “[E]s ist doch wirklich so, daß ein Mensch, auch nüchtern betrachtet, für den anderen nicht viel mehr bedeutet als eine Reihe Gleichnisse” (MoE 580). Despite the loss that is entailed in any truth or knowledge drawn from a parable, no demeaning intentions are fuelling these words, which are devoted to what Moosbrugger and his fate symbolize. They rather establish that, not only our decisions, but also our way of appraising a third party is grounded in parables. Parables are the suitable approach to an individual if one presupposes the impossibility of access to another mind. To approach the Other through parables is to set off from uncertainty and to strive for a comprehensive image, an aggregate of partial truths, feelings, expectations, and dreams that one might wish to realize: Die Beziehung, die zwischen einem Traum und dem, was er ausdrückt, besteht, war ihm bekannt, denn es ist keine andere als die der Analogie, des Gleichnisses, die ihn schon des öfteren beschäftigt hatte. Ein Gleichnis enthält eine Wahrheit und eine Unwahrheit, für

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das Gefühl unlöslich miteinander verbunden. Nimmt man es, wie es ist, und gestaltet es mit den Sinnen, nach Art der Wirklichkeit aus, so entstehen Traum und Kunst, aber zwischen diesen und dem wirklichen, vollen Leben steht eine Glaswand. Nimmt man es mit dem Verstand und trennt das nicht Stimmende vom genau Übereinstimmenden ab, so entsteht Wahrheit und Wissen, aber man zerstört das Gefühl. (MoE 581–582)

It is impossible to catch a glimpse of life’s totality only with one image. While the intellect identifies sameness and transforms it into truth by neglecting emotions, some un-truths materialize and become part of actual life in the form of dreams and art that do not differentiate all the contents of a parable but are modelled through sense and imagination. Art offers the possibility to catch a glimpse of diverse images and their symbolic orders, perhaps even of somebody as a Gleichnis. Art, contrary to knowledge, is described as an endeavour more active than the production of knowledge, since it is not only a question of separating truth from untruth according to some extraneous principles. Instead, art is grounded on the ability to give a sensuous form to parable-like life, which the reader can observe, but if she or he were to stretch an arm, a glass pane would prevent them from touching it. There is no way to gain access, because walls, unlike windows, are never made to open. For this reason, the ideal wall for the appreciation of art would be a transparent one. This way, despite the unsurmountable obstacle, one can still claim to have gotten an accurate picture of the work of art. However, there are also cases in which this mediating wall might not be transparent, but clouded by the breath of a person who got too close, or even exhibit poor workmanship for a realist’s taste, refracting light and disfiguring straight lines with its convexities. In other words, the glass wall serves to thematize the spectator’s role, the fictional threshold, the modes of representation in relation to perception and a refraction index.72

|| 72 For Mülder-Bach, the wall serves as threshold of knowledge, which does not exclude its function as gateway to fictional worlds: “Der Preis für die sinnliche Ausgestaltung des Bildes ist die transparente gläserne Wand, welche die imaginativen und halluzinatorischen Welten von Kunst und Traum vom wirklichem Leben trennt und als gläserne Trennwand die Gewalt ihrer Zerschlagung provoziert. Der Preis für das Wissen ist die Zerstörung des Gefühls, in dem Zusammenstimmendes und Nicht-Übereinstimmendes, Ähnlichkeit und Unähnlichkeit unlöslich miteinander verbunden sind. Auch das Wissen zieht Wände ein oder setzt sie voraus die ‘Wand’ einer ‘festen Welt’, in der ‘die Gefühle’ sich ‘als das Bewegliche und Veränderliche’ tummeln (GW II, 1239), und die Wand eigentlicher sprachlicher Bedeutungen, an die sich die uneigentlichen Verwendungen anlehnen.” Mülder-Bach, Robert Musil, 339.

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Truth, and art as a glazier’s workshop where aisthesis and poiesis merge, are both distilled by living, or more accurately, by vivifying through vivisection the parables as reality’s core: Nach Art jener Bakterienstämme, die etwas Organisches in zwei Teile spalten, zerlebt der Menschenstamm den ursprünglichen Lebenszustand des Gleichnisses in die feste Materie der Wirklichkeit und Wahrheit und in die glasige Atmosphäre von Ahnung, Glaube und Künstlichkeit. Es scheint, daß es dazwischen keine dritte Möglichkeit gibt; aber wie oft endet etwas Ungewisses erwünscht, wenn man ohne viel Überlegen damit beginnt! (MoE 582)

While the Gleichnis alludes to the potential ways to signify the world, character, in the sense of personality, will be posited in chapter 3.1 as the glazier who cannot work unaffected by his or her materials, but rather manipulates his or her own glassy essence. For this reason, this is a turning point in the argumentation. The refraction index is the link between the previous and the last part of this investigation. It can give an account of the interaction between partial truths and untruths, between the experience of actual life and the irregular form of the glass wall. Thomas Pavel uses the refraction index as a metaphor to illustrate the relation between the glass wall, truth, and a biographical account. In his eloquent example, Pavel depicts a trial and two different biographical accounts contesting each other but without the constraints of a common sense or perspective. Each narrated life can define its structuring principles and criteria to select events, the theory from which they should be evaluated, and the languages in which they should be told. And if necessary, these life books can postulate their true-regime, define their modal palette, and in this manner include and systematize all kinds of truths and un-truths, in other words, opinions.73 This “semantic heteronomy”74 with the potential to absorb all sentences and lose the stable footing granted by a consistent theory, unless it is organized in a “highly rhetorical way,”75 is a feature of the parable. Tristram Shandy and Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften present the true and false ideas of a life, as well as a

|| 73 Pavel, Fictional Worlds, 52–53, 65–69. 74 “The above story […] suggests a geological view of texts: like bedrock, texts amalgamate strata of diverse geological origins. Pressed together by the cohesive force of petrification, the color and texture of these strata refer back to their birthplace; it is the task of the enlightened analysis to reflect not only on various structural constraints and on textual coherence, but also on the deeply ingrained semantic heteronomy of texts, on the principle of dispersion embedded in them.” Pavel, Fictional Worlds, 71. 75 Pavel, Fictional Worlds, 70.

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refraction index, which is beyond the logic of fictional world theory. Both works rely on an ethos as a comprehensive and inexact means to produce an image that can potentially encompass the whole world and is affected by it, but only through analogies.76 The Gleichnis functions as a pivot between a transcendental conception and the idea of an immanence where all objects and individuals possess an inner potency. Due to this inner potency, the parable works as an internalization,77 so we could fairly say that parables originate in a character producing an image of the world.

2.4.2 Bivalence principle and truthful lines in Tristram Shandy 2.4.2.1 Neither true nor false: beyond the bivalence principle In both novels, to understand life means to delve into the contents of the mind, as well as to differentiate between the functions and effects of each idea by weighing the bearings that, not only facts, but also a fantastic or poetic course of action might have on a decision-making process. The ideal realm, in both novels, is variegated. Many dialogues in Tristram Shandy support such a claim, but the example that bears the closest resemblance to Möglichkeitssinn is: “A WHITE BEAR! Very well. Have I ever seen one? Might I ever have seen one? Am I ever to see one? Ought I ever to have seen one? Or can I ever see one? Would I had seen a white bear! (for how can I imagine it?)” (V, xliii, 487). The hypothetical white bear brought up by Walter Shandy is meant to illustrate the benefits of integrating aspect and modality into formation. The acquired logical prowess is just the first stage though. This method aims beyond linguistic reference and white bears; it is directed towards ethical consequences: “If I should see a white bear, what would I say? If I should never see a white bear, what then?” (V, xliii, 487). To imagine a course of action for a hypothetical encounter with a white bear paves the way for ethical reflections on a purely fictional basis. White bears can

|| 76 Kühne, Das Gleichnis, 10. “Es verhält sich bei Musil nicht so, daß die Analoga Dinge abschildern, deren Realität vorausgesetzt wird, sondern die Bilder konstituieren überhaupt erst Realität.” 77 Kühne, Das Gleichnis, 14. “Das integrierende Moment des Vergleichs muß also hier zusammen mit dem Prinzip der Individualität und Subjektivität gesehen werden, einmal, weil Individualität selbst ursprüngliche konkrete Integration ist, andererseits, weil Subjektivität der eigentliche Beweggrund des Gleichnisses, des Vergleichens ist, – wenn ‘Integration’ so viel heißt wie Hereinnahme eines Äußeren, Fremden in eine geformte oder noch sich formende, eine geschlossene oder noch sich schließende Ganzheit.”

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appear in different media with generic constraints, so if it is highly unlikely for me to witness a white bear in its white-beariness, then I should ask: “If I never have, can, must, or shall see a white bear alive; have I ever seen the skin of one? Did I ever see one painted?—described? Have I never dreamed of one?” (V, xliii, 487). Our knowledge of white bear is independent of seeing it, and we could even claim that there are many types of white bears, e.g., painted, narrated, dreamed. Even the people in our social environment and their opinions can lead us to them: “Did my father, mother, uncle, aunt, brothers or sisters, ever see a white bear? What would they give? How would they behave? How would the white bear have behaved? Is he wild? Tame? Terrible? Rough? Smooth?” (V, xliii, 487). The inquiry after the white bear transforms the bear itself. Walter begins by asking whether his family has ever experienced a white bear, then changes its modal sense and advances behavioral questions regarding his family’s reactions and finally moves to the white bear’s temperament. Despite the humorous contrast between rough and smooth, the semantic field displayed at the end demands of the reader to draw a conclusion, make a judgment based on the hypothetical and arbitrary traits of this bear. The speculations about a white bear’s features and behaviour lead me to imagine if it is desirable, if I should act and make all possible efforts to satisfy my curiosity: “—Is the white bear worth seeing?— —Is there no sin in it?— Is it better than a BLACK ONE?” (V, xliii, 487). What started as a simple digression to which Walter devoted all his attention and theoretical powers, is turned by his obsessive mind and by means of a progression of rhetorical questions into a moral evaluation and a scrutiny of a state of affairs. The absent referential bedding for the white bear even encourages him to find a contrary specimen through semantics and logic, which due to the sheer inertia overlooks the bountiful palette from which to pick the bear’s color. With this example, Tristram Shandy undermines the idea of a universal logical form and disarms “the Logic of Evaluative criticism” in favour of the universality entailed in narratives as possible experiences.78 The knowledge a word can impart is not exhausted in an assertive sentence. Such is the moral behind the treaty on white bears and the principle of Walter Shandy’s pedagogics: “The whole entirely depends, added my father, in a low voice, upon the auxiliary verbs, Mr. Yorick” (V, xlii, 484). In the notes to the Florida Edition, Melvyn New points out that this fragment’s sources can be traced back to three authors. Besides the usual suspects in Sterne’s intertextual || 78 Wayne Booth, The Company We Keep: an ethics of fiction (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), 56.

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conundrums, that is, Montaigne and Locke, Sterne satirizes Obadiah Walker’s infinite chain of questions in Of education, especially of young gentlemen [1673].79 Walter grapples with Locke’s language conception, according to which one can construct complex ideas from simple ones associated with specific words. At the same time, he reveals Montaigne’s influence on his work by underscoring the experience of the multiple, in this case the experience of the diverse contents of the mind. For a pedagogic method suitable for a world divested of a center,80 the diverse and multiple are needed to explore the truth-regime and to discern the difference between ideas and how their origin can challenge autonomy. Regardless of their bearings on what is deemed true, all ideas must be part of the life story that pleas for understanding, since they might show where the mistake lies. The chapters that discuss education illustrate such claims using different layers of the narrative. Before the conversation drifts into the white bear vortex and Walter exerts himself to discover all its fictional facets, he claims that: The highest stretch of improvement a single word is capable of, is a high metaphor,——for which, in my opinion, the idea is generally the worse, and not the better;——but be that as it may,—when the mind has done that with it—there is an end,—the mind and the idea are at rest,—until a second idea enters;——and so on. (V, xlii, 485)

Such words suggest a character who is usually carried away from reality by systems and theories. Walter’s opinion enthrones the polysemy and inaccuracy of a word, instead of its possibility to be distinct, and might therefore seem somewhat contradictory and out of character. However, his commitment to a theory does not reside in a promised truth. Walter disregards the contents and happily settles for a method’s sway, for any rationale that can be followed to absurd situations that are meant to unveil the world. His unstoppable engagement with a theory is the reason behind his praise of metaphors. They might lack conceptual precision, but they materialize an end, a fictional handle by

|| 79 New and New, “The Notes”, 389–394. 80 At this point it should become more evident why Giordano Bruno was brought to bear on the analysis of potency in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften. Montaigne’s and Bruno’s philosophy decenter the world. Karlheinz Stierle, “Montaigne und die Erfahrung der Vielheit”, in Die Pluralität der Welten, ed. Wolf-Dieter Stempel and Karlheinz Stierle (München: Fink, 1987), 417–448; Hans Blumenberg, “Aspekte der Epochenschwelle”, in Die Legitimität der Neuzeit, 2nd revised edition (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1988), 643–650.

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which to manipulate and carry the world, but only for a moment, since there are no absolute handles. Metaphors, the highest attire a word can don, stand for the multiple possibilities of intelligibility. They are comparable to the Gleichnis in Musil’s novel. In Tristram Shandy, the idea of metaphor as core of our relation to reality is shaped by character. Metaphors, though unstable, offer manageable handles, which means that auxiliary verbs give modal nuances to the metaphorical possibilities advanced by a whimsical personality: “Now the use of the Auxiliaries is, at once to set the soul a-going by herself upon the materials as they are brought her; and by the versability of this great engine, round which they are twisted, to open new tracts of enquiry, and make every idea engender millions” (V, xlii, 485). The elucidation of moral character as engine and inner principle is discussed in this study’s last part, so let us focus for the moment on its rich production: opinions. The opinionated characters of Sterne’s novel are constructed with humor, in a Shaftesburyan sense that highlights understanding another’s passions. By transitioning between the character’s diverse perspectives, the narrator distantiates himself from his diegetic dwellers and reveals their peculiarities. At the same time, further textual devices hint at the narrator’s finite perspective, so nobody has the last word on a subject. Any member of the Shandean clan might try to impose their image of the world and their favorite word associations, but these situations always end in Shandean conversations in which the intersection between each character’s idiosyncratic semantic field is minimal and, in some cases, even inexistent. Communication becomes a chasm that can only be bridged with sentiment. Gestures can communicate without any mediation other than the simple perception of a performance, which leads to a harmonious sympathy.81 How the characters cling to their convictions despite the communication problems caused by their rigidity is both shown and discussed in Shandy Hall’s parlour. Firstly, the premise regarding the educational benefits of auxiliary verbs is given a rich declension. Walter is trying to develop it insofar as the situation and his capacities allow. Secondly, this exemplification takes place after Toby and corporal Trim advance their own variation on the subject, which is based on a totally different meaning of auxiliary: “For my own part, quoth my uncle Toby, I have given it up.——The Danes, an’ please your honour, quoth the corporal, who were on the left at the siege of Limerick, were all auxiliaries.—— And very good ones, said my uncle Toby.—But the auxiliaries, Trim, my brother || 81 New, Laurence Sterne as Satirist, 31–40.; Traugott, Tristram Shandy's World, 73.

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is talking about,—I conceive to be different things.—— ” (V, xlii, 485). The simple mention of “auxiliaries” fuels the metaphorical engine that “sets a soul a going” and expands its limits by bringing everything close to its semantic field regardless of misunderstandings. This moderate digression undermines Walter’s theory about auxiliaries. Polysemy softens the gravity of his words and implicitly supports the idea of a multipolar world, of an experience of the manifoldness that Sterne inherited from Augustan literature and its humanist roots, as well as from Montaigne’s essays.82 Tristram Shandy and Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften share the essay’s constitutive intertextual drive. In Sterne’s novel, this drive reveals a chaotic palette of possibilities. This chaos of possibility surfaces when one looks for truth beyond the correspondence between facts and ideas, and declares together with Lucian of Samosata in “True History” that all claims are true because the narrative’s intention is not to lie but to truly tell a fictional account. Tristram takes a similar stance and rebukes any incredulous reader: “Had this volume been a farce, which, unless every one’s life and opinions are to be looked upon as a farce as well as mine, I see no reason to suppose—the last chapter, Sir, had finished the first act of it, and then this chapter must have set off thus” (V, xv, 443). The direct reception of Lucian’s texts is evident in Sterne’s allusions throughout the novel to the fable of Momus, which also represents a dialogue with Leon Battista Alberti’s text. These intertexts influence the way Sterne tackles mental life and attempts to include a wide range of contents whose place and impact on a true-regime varies. This multiplicity circumvents the tertium non datur by distinguishing how an idea is anchored in reality, and by revealing how the counterpart to the “Wirklichkeitsmensch,” the possibilitarian, brings with him a potentiality that nullifies this contraposition. In view of this, the Shandean digression, which is the form that opinions adopt in this narrative context, is an umbrella term for the diverse stylistic devices that constitute Sterne’s narrative deviousness. Digressions are a stylistic feature of Sterne’s prose, but at the same time they gesture towards historiography. Digressions deviate from a linear-factual account and carry with them imprecisions and tiny neglectable errors which, for

|| 82 Stierle defines manifoldness thusly: “Der Prozeß der Freisetzung der Vielheit, die Vervielfältigung der Zentren, auf die hin das freigesetzte Vielfältige sich neu zur Einheit zusammenschließen sollte, gewinnen eine Dynamik, die seither nicht mehr zum Stillstand gekommen ist. Die Freisetzung der Vielheit kennt mannigfaltige Erscheinungsweisen und vollzieht sich in unterschiedlichen Zusammenhängen, die dennoch miteinander in schwer durchschaubarer Weise korrespondieren.” Stierle, “Montaigne und die Erfahrung der Vielheit”, 417.

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a punctilious mind, might eliminate truth. Notwithstanding, the digressive inaccuracy shouldn’t pose a problem since digressions are quite different from arguments. They do not belong to a logical framework, but have diverse origins and, in some cases, are akin to literary genres. Digressions construct relatability and aim perhaps, as Aristotle would have it, at the general truth of poetry. However, in Tristram Shandy, they become the medium in which to convey an “improbable truth.” The line of beauty, the line where ethical and aesthetic threads become intertwined. The topic of truth in relation to a biographical account is articulated in Sterne’s novel through the figure of the historiographer, whose professional probity motivates him to tell the whole truth about his life and include even the least serious and irrelevant ideas that assault his mind. The tension between imagination and factual account defines the novel’s ambiguous relation to truth and metaphor. For Tristram, a historian should not overuse metaphors and polysemy: “to understand how my uncle Toby could mistake the bridge—I fear I must give you an exact account of the road which led to it;—or to drop my metaphor (for there is nothing more dishonest in an historian than the use of one)” (III, xxiii, 244). By connecting a road to the bridge, the narrator revels in the miscommunication that reigns in Shandy hall and obscures the explanation of the facts. But bridge in this context refers to a bridge for Tristram’s broken nose, as well as to a hypothetical miniature bridge that Toby Shandy could use in his enacted sieges, but as the narrator will explain it also refers to phallus that, like all bridges, can be shattered.83 The narrator, on his part, advances a further meaning for bridge: a crucial event that, when narrated, connects or establishes continuity on the road of history. The bridge is the event selected and framed in a narrative context by the historiographer in order to posit a causal link; it is literary mastery over artifice. But independently of all the variations of the bridge, one can concur with Sigurd Burckhardt’s modest assessment: “I am far from able to solve the vastly complicated problem of' Sterne’s narrative machinery, but I will try to carry it forward a step by defining the element common to bridges, ballistics, story lines and writing. This element is that of “getting something across,” whether it is missiles or people or meanings.”84 || 83 “The ambiguity of the bridge, if I have rightly interpreted it, fits well with what is manifestly the chief structural metaphor of the novel: the interchangeability of sex and war. Its purport surely is this: direct communication between people, of the kind that would eliminate the pitfalls of language, is radically ambiguous; at this level, no distinction between love and enmity is possible.” Sigurd Burckhardt, “Tristram Shandy's Law of Gravity”, English Literary History 28 (1961): 82. 84 Burckhardt, “Tristram Shandy’s Law of Gravity”, 80.

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Any stylistic digression obscuring this road perverts the historiographer’s goal, namely, to depict events as they actually happened. In a historical text, the narrated is supposed to correspond with past facts. According to the most traditional definition in literary theory, history is “Beschreibung und Erklärung der tatsächlichen Geschehnisse und ihrer Ursachen.”85 Although Tristram’s interest in facts pales in comparison to his interest in opinions, he considers himself nonetheless a historiographer, because mental life might be only open to speculative approximations, but it is still an experience that can be attributed to a third. Exactly as an historian, Tristram endeavours to posit a unity, to explain and find the causes behind his actions together with the relation between events and his mental life.86 He uses mimesis to create a model for experience in which, contrary to the expectations raised by considering himself an historian, there are no graspable events available.87 If here Tristram seems to contend with an Aristotelian stance, this opposition becomes even more evident in the novel’s narrative construction, which aims at a progressive individualization and gives primacy to character construction. Tristram as a narrator is not depicting the general, as a poet should.88 His life as a writer is devoted to constructing a unique model that cannot be said to be better, worse, or even to correspond to reality. This manner of presenting his life was not a novelty in the times of Sterne. It can be traced back to a tradition that started with Bocaccio and Montaigne and marked the passage from exempla to novella.89 This shift is grounded in the experience of manifoldness in the sense that man can instate diverse states of affairs independently of god or a figural reading. From this new perspective follows a “Dezentrierung, die auf eine Entleerung des Beispielgehalts hinausläuft”, in which stories do not convey the general by means of a particular attire. Instead, they demarcate and || 85 Dorothea Frede, “Die Einheit der Handlung (Kap. 7–9)” in Aristoteles. Poetik, ed. Otfried Höffe (Berlin: Akademie, 2009), 114–116. 86 Frede, “Die Einheit der Handlung”, 115. 87 Here I understand mimesis, following Joachim Küpper, as a comprehensive process independent form a specific image of the world. “Wirklichkeitsdarstellung, Bindung an die doxa und idealisierende Überhöhung sind bei Aristoteles drei legitime Varianten der Mimesis […]. Nicht anders als im ersten Kapitel im Hinblick auf die medialen Varianten der Mimesis gilt auch in diesem zweiten Kapitel im Hinblick auf die Optionen hinsichtlich Wirklichkeitsadäquanz, daß für Aristoteles diese Varianten existieren, insofern der Erwähnung bedürfen, aber nicht als Kriterien genommen werden können, zu entscheiden, was poiêsis sei und was nicht, bzw. wie poiêsis beschaffen sein sollte und wie nicht.” Joachim Küpper, “Dichtung als Mimesis (Kap. 1–3)” in Aristoteles. Poetik, ed. Otfried Höffe (Berlin: Akademie, 2009), 36. 88 Frede, “Die Einheit der Handlung”, 115. 89 Stierle, “Montaigne und die Erfahrung der Vielheit”, 431–432.

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offer up a specific case, a case not only nourished by the manifoldness of the sensible world, but also fuelled by an individual’s imagination.90 By implementing idiosyncratic poetics, the novel is offering a model for experience based on a single experience or a case’s singularity. The image it presents establishes its own value scale and even the verisimilitude that makes plausible the whimsical reactions of each member of the Shandy family.91 At first glance, their interaction surprises the reader, until it becomes foreseeable because Tristram keeps on working, abiding to his narrative agenda and allows the reader to become savvy about the characters’ diverse personalities. Personality represents the gravitational center that offers a consistent but perhaps not homogeneous worldview. The decentralization of the exemplary in literature does not entail that the individual should be the self-sufficient and self-legitimated core. Different discourses – literary, pedagogical, medical, or scientific – are intertwined in Shandean conversations. Some characters might defend a discipline, but their opinions are usually an amalgamation of their cultural environment. These discourses might surreptitiously contradict each other, undermine each other, and thus deter any claim on a monopoly of truth. In the intertextual conundrum, there is no vantage point.92 Like the Gleichnis, conversation and soliloquy thrive thanks to imprecisions that welcome an incessant rendering of the world, driven by diverse modal perspectives that preclude totality. Imprecisions might represent errors within a certain framework, but from a broader perspective they are also a gateway to diverse frameworks. This claim is grounded in the ironic moral that can be derived from a Shandean story with Walter as the protagonist. That an historian’s excessive use of metaphors leads to errors in a factual narration, to mistakes in calculation that falsifies the results, is grounded in Walter’s idea that: Knowledge, like matter, he would affirm, was divisible in infinitum;——that the grains and scruples were as much a part of it, as the gravitation of the whole world.—In a word, he would say, error was error,—no matter where it fell,——whether in a fraction,—or a pound,—’twas alike fatal to truth, and she was kept down at the bottom of her well, as inevitably by a mistake in the dust of a butterfly’s wings,——as in the disk of the sun, the moon, and all the stars of heaven put together.

|| 90 Stierle, “Montaigne und die Erfahrung der Vielheit”, 431–432. 91 For the irrelevance of a real substratum for verisimilitude, see Frede, “Die Einheit der Handlung”, 117. 92 Behind this idea is Bakthin’s dialogized heteroglossia, Mikhail M. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel”, in The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 259–275.

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He would often lament that it was for want of considering this properly, and of applying it skilfully to civil matters, as well as to speculative truths, that so many things in this world were out of joint; […] (II, xviii, 171)

Walter’s dogmatic approach to truth characterizes him as man of science. With the law of gravity, Walter lets us know that there is an order in the world, mechanisms that do not make room for exceptions, scruples, nor grains. But gravity is a motif that surpasses natural laws and encompasses the characters’ gravity and how seriously they take their own opinions and their truth. In the realm of opinions and multiple frameworks, gravity plays a role comparable to the emperor’s role in Ulrich’s symbolic order. The law of gravity represents a stable framework and, in the scholastic tradition, it reminds us of the unmoved mover, the cosmogony that places a creator and uncaused cause as the gravitational center which was challenged by Giordano Bruno.93 Walter’s penchant for systematizing ideas always ends in an inflexible and unsustainable position, but the origin is not always the unmoved mover, because, as he says, things in his world “were out of joint.” The narrator, and perhaps even Walter himself, is aware of the inherent contradiction in Walter’s behaviour and beliefs. He argues that any system is perfectible and that, with constant work, one could avoid error. However, error is merely relative to the system. Although he knows that the world is “out of joint” and lacks a cornerstone upon which to construct a unified framework, Walter’s openness to diverse systems corresponds to his contempt for the common approach. He still believes paradoxically in a vantage point and in a singular and transparent Reason: —Mr. Shandy, my father, Sir, would see nothing in the light in which others placed it;—he placed things in his own light;—he would weigh nothing in common scales;—no, he was too refined a researcher to lie open to so gross an imposition.—To come at the exact weight of things in the scientific steel-yard, the fulcrum, he would say, should be almost invisible, to avoid all friction from popular tenets;—without this the minutiæ of philosophy, which would always turn the balance, will have no weight at all. (II, xviii, 170)

Walter’s obsession with systematic truth and his belief in a unified framework is undermined by his exceptional relation to weight. It seems that the Copernican revolution affected him, and still he prefers to ignore it. Walter constantly eschews sex and disdains his body, that is, his fulcrum for the manipulation of the || 93 This topic is discussed in chapter 2.6.

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world. The contradiction lies in the fact that while Walter assumes that one can find a fulcrum without popular tenets or a physical presence affecting the experiment, he discards any common ground. His personal method, driven by his obsession with systematizations, should lead him alone to a vantage point. He believes that his personality can help to posit a scale for the world. Maybe because the world itself is “out of joint” without an unmoved mover, he wishes to sublimate his personality into an image on the world.94 In a sense, digressions in the novel represent errors. They deviate from the main framework and from common expectations regarding a narrative flow, to bring new perspectives that flirt with totality and manifoldness. Digressions never attempt though to supersede the factual nor logic as the privileged perspective. They would never presume to impose their worldview but, with their intertextual complexity, they attempt to depict a mental life and, in the narrator’s own words, “to put into [a story] all the wit and the judgment (be it more or less) which the great Author and Bestower of them had thought fit originally to give me———so that, as your worships see—’tis just as God pleases” (III, Preface, 227). Apart from offering the best example of the interrelationship between digressions, mental life, and a textual device that amalgamates diverse sources, the preface to the third volume steers away from a conflict with propositions and assertive language – as the white bear already established. Digressions rather illustrate the matter at hand, which is quite a different thing from argumentation. Following an invented source, namely “de fartendi et illustrandi fallaciis,” Tristram clarifies: That an illustration is no argument——nor do I maintain the wiping of a looking-glass clean to be a syllogism;——but you all, may it please your worships, see the better for it— ——so that the main good these things do is only to clarify the understanding, previous to the application of the argument itself, in order to free it from any little motes, or specks of opacular matter, which, if left swimming therein, might hinder a conception and spoil all. (III, Preface 227–228)

Digression stands for diverse rhetorical devices that expand the scope of an inquiry, but they could never exhaust its subject because they tackle it from || 94 Moglen describes Walter thus: “He believes firmly in the mind’s capacity for discovering, creating, and verbalizing truths which can lay claim to some objective validity. He is the scholar whose hobbyhorse (the creation of systems, the formalization of knowledge) is born from his attempts at reconciling the pure world of mind with a physical world that is volatile and full of contradiction.” Helen Moglen, The philosophical Irony of Laurence Sterne (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1975), 69.

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diverse incompatible sides. Digressions are tools to circumvent the difficult task of wiping the looking glass, or the eye of the mind, or finding an invisible fulcrum. They circumvent the cartesian idea of mind as the mirror of nature and the glassy essence that the moral character embodies. In contrast to a mirror whose pristine images might make us forget its mediating function, the looking glass requires some care and maintenance to fool any spectator and make him feel before the events. The illustrations reveal the character, the “opacular matter” affecting thought, but they also spring from the character’s imagination, so they are at the same time imperfections in the linear narrative, but imperfections governed by a personality with which the reader should get acquainted in order to discern and judge its regularities. For the purpose of cleaning his narrative glass and guiding the reader to the underlying truth, Tristram uses all means available: “You see as plain as can be, that I write as a man of erudition;—that even my similies, my allusions, my illustrations, my metaphors, are erudite,—and that I must sustain my character properly, and contrast it properly too,—else what would become of me? Why, Sir, I should be undone;—” (II, ii, 98). Tristram’s continuous display of wit and erudition fulfils two functions: it destroys the idea of a vantage perspective and reveals implicitly his moral character in the sense of manner of relating to the world. In this respect, Tristram Shandy’s conversational style and its intertextual mixture are analogous to Musil’s Essayismus and the role of the Gleichnis: The former represents a method and the latter the different, unfettered variations it can produce. In both cases, one could claim that: Writing, when properly managed (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation. As no one, who knows what he is about in good company, would venture to talk all;——so no author, who understands the just boundaries of decorum and good-breeding, would presume to think all: The truest respect which you can pay to the reader’s understanding, is to halve this matter amicably, and leave him something to imagine, in his turn, as well as yourself. (II, xi, 125)

By traversing various discourses and genres, both novels refuse to fix a point from which one could orientate himself. Both discard the possibility to completely comprehend something. For Tristram Shandy, the marble page (III, xxxvi, 268f) symbolizes the wall against which knowledge can only relentlessly and ineffectively collide. However, before the unescapable end, Tristram Shandy rejoices in a multiple truth. The nuances of this multiple truth, which along with truth itself include error, lie, illustration, etc., are so rich that their complex

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combinations make it impossible to discern if an assertion has bearings on a decision. To summarize, in Helen Moglen’s words, “the narrative style of Tristram Shandy is devised as an attempt to make the reader more malleable by involving him in the ambiguities, indirections, and contradictions which represent the truth on its level of appearance.”95 This truth, however, is the variegated truth that constitutes mental life and not any mental life, but Tristram’s phenomenal experience of the mental. “The rhetorical figures designed to promote doubt, confusion, contradiction, and awareness of multiplicity also reveal similar states of mind in Tristram, who is frequently victimized by the form of his own work.”96 Tristram is thus victimized by his own mind which, in Musil’s terms, can concretize various facets of the richness implied by the Gleichnis as a totality grounded on similes.97 Therein resides the ironical mode to which Moglen devoted her study, “for [Sterne] describes a world in which reason is the slave of imagination and reality a function of private illusion.”98 The continuous individualization, grounded in a potentiality whose contents are still undefined, creates a unbridgeable conflict between that which, thanks to reflection, one imagines possible to come into being and a reality unrelated to our striving, inapprehensible in our own terms, impossible to be actualized in or for our wished image. “The term irony, then, indicates a technique of appearing to be less than one is, which in literature becomes most commonly a technique of saying as little and meaning as much as possible, or, in a more general way, a pattern of words that turns away from direct statement or its own obvious meaning.”99

|| 95 Moglen, The philosophical Irony of Laurence Sterne, 36. 96 Moglen, The philosophical Irony of Laurence Sterne, 40. 97 “Die Analogie ist also die Ausdrucksform der unmöglichen Total-Abbildung des Lebens – d. h. des Grundverhältnisses von Ordnung und Anarchie, von Wissen und Glauben, von toten und lebendigen Gedanken usw. in einem Begriff; in diesem Mißverhältnis gründet übrigens, nach Ulrichs Ansicht, unsere Geschichtlichkeit: Das Überwirkliche versucht seine im Nu nicht darstellbare Fülle nach und nach und doch stets nur vorläufig zu entfalten, ohne dass sich der ‘zerbrochene Kreis’ am Ende schlösse und der uranfänglichen Ruhe wieder Raum gäbe.” Frank, “Auf der Suche nach einem Grund”, 341. 98 Moglen, The philosophical Irony of Laurence Sterne, 125. 99 Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), 40. Frye adds to this definition of irony: “When we try to isolate the ironic as such, we find that it seems to be simply the attitude of the poet as such, a dispassionate construction of a literary form, with all assertive elements, implied or expressed, eliminated. Irony, as a mode, is born from the low mimetic; it takes life exactly as it finds it. But the ironist fables without moralizing, and has no object but his subject.” (40–41)

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2.4.2.2 The line of beauty or the truth in a fictional biography Perhaps the grave image of a marble page is not the last impression the novel wishes to leave on its readers. This barrier is insuperable to the same degree that a definitive truth is unattainable. But before this collision takes place, the constantly shifting perspectives give rise to imprecisions, to an inadequate gesticulation for the circumstances, like a tic nurtured by habit and predisposition, a tic reminding us how the novel thrives in error as well as in the fictive images bearing on experience. No matter how farfetched a commentary might seem or how wrong opinions might sound to the audience, the narrator still claims: “I would not shake my credit in telling an improbable truth” (I, ix, 25). Although in Tristram Shandy the Aristotelian recommendation is severed from a central perspective governing what is probable and improbable, the novel is still committed to a matter-of-fact mode of narrating in which the mind – as a matter of fact – digresses. To convey this assumption, the narration has both to indicate that the opinions belong to a highly nuanced truth-regime and that a linear narrative structure is improbable in view of Tristram’s life concept. Posited as a principle, such an idea is inseparable from its realization. Life is the structural thread sketching the sinuous and discontinuous line that conjoins and makes ethics and aesthetics visible in Sterne’s novel. The motif of the straight line has compositional, or more precisely, poetological implications, so it is no way irrelevant that the narrator repeatedly confesses to be illustrating a topic and working as a painter: “Writers of my stamp have one principle in common with painters. Where an exact copying makes our pictures less striking, we choose the less evil; deeming it even more pardonable to trespass against truth, than beauty. This is to be understood cum grano salis; but be it as it will […] “ (II, iii, 104). Grains of salt sinking by virtue of their own weight are the errors a writer must assume if she or he wishes to leave the reader something to imagine, something that escapes the law of gravity. An image’s inaccuracies allow the reader to move between assertions and doubts, and these almost imperceptible inconsistencies can be captured in a composition by resorting to fiction and underscoring the artifices engrained in a work of art. Such a composition is an endeavour worthy of an innate funambulist like Toby’s valet, Trim: He stood,——for I repeat it, to take the picture of him in at one view, with his body swayed, and somewhat bent forwards,—his right leg from under him, sustaining seven-eighths of his whole weight,———the foot of his left leg, the defect of which was no disadvantage to his attitude, advanced a little,—not laterally, nor forwards, but in a line betwixt them;— his knee bent, but that not violently,—but so as to fall within the limits of the line of beauty;—and I add, of the line of science too;—for consider, it had one eighth part of his body to bear up;—so that in this case the position of the leg is determined,—because the foot could

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be no farther advanced, or the knee more bent, than what would allow him, mechanically to receive an eighth part of his whole weight under it, and to carry it too. […] This I recommend to painters:—need I add,—to orators!—I think not; for unless they practise it,—— —they must fall upon their noses. (II, xvii, 141 emphasis mine)

The line of beauty is so contrived that it seems quite impracticable, almost impossible to attain outside a work of art. It only exists in an instant and artifice alone can stop time to reveal the fragile figure aiming and implying with its silhouette the movement, the action, or even the ethics we endeavour to actualize. An intention that defies gravity can only be thought by suspending the spatio-temporal constraints, a feat achievable with literary means, but only if one is willing to risk one’s own wit, that is, the nose upon which a failed endeavour lands. The means with which one conveys beauty and articulates science should be, so recommends the narrator, practiced and learned by diving into tradition. This position towards learning and different literary genres nourishes the complex truth-regime of the novel and alludes to its interminable sources and their perspectives. Moreover, this conception entails a way to relate to the exemplary in a narration, which is crucial to understanding Tristram’s truth. The question regarding what we can learn from literature or from all the different opinions brought up by tradition is not so easy to rule out, as Tristram would like us to believe: “Now my father had a way, a little like that of Job’s (in case there ever was such a man——if not, there’s an end of the matter” (V, xiii, 441). If it were so easy for Tristram to discard a character who could help him elucidate the matter at hand, his story would not have amounted to nine volumes that barely tell the reader when, where and how he was born. The question of whether there is such a man as Job is an example of the reception of fictional texts in the novel and all the possible fictive examples that Tristram or his associative mind might bring up to illustrate a point. Indeed, this hasty judgment, which belongs solely to Walter, contradicts the Shandean programme as a whole because it overlooks the effect that fictional characters have on an ethical inquiry, but helps us reflect upon narrative examples that posit a case. Only a proper name can trigger a narrative background from which to draw elements for an interpretation.100 This reference to Job – much more than reminding the reader how Walter patiently suffers interruptions in the middle of

|| 100 Walter Haug, “Exempelsammlungen im narrativen Rahmen: Vom ‘Pañcatantra’ zum ‘Dekameron’”, in Exempel und Exempelsammlungen, Fortuna vitrea vol. 2, ed. Walter Haug and Burghart Wachinger (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1991), 267.

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his harangues or how he tolerates the inopportune questions of his audience – invites us to compare the Shandean quest for fictive truth with the medieval efforts to save the truth of pagan texts by incorporating them into a Christian framework and discerning their higher truth.101 This truth could be discovered through an allegorical reading – which roughly put would be an abstract interpretation within a religious framework but independent of historical time – or through a figural reading that proposes to understand narrated events both as history and prophecy. Every stage is part of an individual history and, at the same time, it is embedded in a schematic religious narrative. In an eschatological conception, history does not repeat, but the figural reading posits events which are fragments in linear historical time. These fragments reveal a truth that is continuously present throughout time.102 Notwithstanding, Tristram tell us that there was no such character as Job. Tristram’s search for certainty is secular and his experience of time is unique and independent both of history as intersubjective agreement and of eschatology. So now the question is: what can we do with Job’s story? The key is the Exempla tradition. The Exemplum is an illustration of a concrete case which, despite its foothold in history, must have enough leeway to allow for its application in different contexts. There is thus a tension between the exemplary and the narrative form, between the univocal example strived for and the multiple meanings a narration triggers.103 An exemplary narrative should find, ideally, a balance between constraining the meaning and broadening the scope of its application. Therein resides the truth to be extracted from it. Haug claims that this tension – inherent to the exemplary function – was assuaged throughout tradition by resorting to collections. An Exempla collection

|| 101 Klaus Grubmüller, “Fabel, Exemple, Allegorese. Über Sinnbildungsverfahren und Verwendungszusammenhänge”, in Exempel und Exempel-Sammlungen, ed. Walter Haug and Burghart Wachinger (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1991), 69. 102 “Das Ewige ist schon in ihnen figuriert, und so sind sie sowohl vorläufig-fragmentarische als auch verhüllte jederzeitliche Wirklichkeit.” Auerbach, “Figura”, 474. “Es ist die figurale Struktur, die den geschichtlichen Vorgang bewahrt, indem sie ihn enthüllend deutet, und die ihn nur dadurch deuten kann, dass sie ihn bewahrt.” (481) “So ist Vergil in der Komödie zwar der geschichtliche Vergil selbst, aber er ist es auch wieder nicht mehr; denn der geschichtliche ist nur Figura der erfüllten Wahrheit, die das Gedicht offenbart, und diese Erfüllung ist mehr, ist wirklicher, ist bedeutender als die Figura.” (484) 103 Haug, “Exempelsammlungen im narrativen Rahmen”, 265–267.

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is governed by an editorial strategy that works as a cohesive force and, at the same time, defines the truth aimed for.104 A life so rich in ideas and poor in actions is not concrete enough to serve as a case in an Exempla collection. But if read through the lens of this tradition, Tristram’s narrative agenda shows that, for him, the unambiguousness of a case lies in actions and their stable interpretation. Contrarily, the potential meanings that bestow the flexibility needed for the application of the narrative to different contexts are related to the artifice, to the conception of the mind as potency, to constructing a biography by delving into traditions, genres, stylistic devices, and to achieving a structure that resembles the line of beauty. Tristram Shandy dismisses the balance sought by the Exempla and prefers to focus on the process of narrating and building certainty. Consequently, the novel posits possible interpretations with narrative glosses for absent or implied deeds. All the opinions create a silhouette that probably contains actions depicted with a univocal meaning. However, to traverse the fuzzy membrane of meaning and reach this core would lead to absolute certainty, which is relinquished by Tristram’s method. By preferring perpetual narrative motion, Tristram adheres to a gesture initiated by the Decameron and strives to become wise in narrating, to attain certainty at least for a moment.105 The novel’s editorial strategy and cohesive force spring from the life concept that impedes the reduction of narratives to a univocal meaning. The certainty strived for neither relies on the factual or historical events – both observable intersubjective measures – , nor on the authority of a narrative model that would allow him to identify the correspondences between his path

|| 104 A collection can seek, like the Panchatantra, to convey the totality of experiences; or it can endeavor, like The Seven Wise Masters, to surpass exemplary wisdom by positing a constellation of contradicting voices; or it could draw its cohesive force, like El conde Lucanor, from fixing an axiological framework around which the selection of stories and their interpretation revolve; or, finally, a collection can subvert tradition, follow the strategy of the Decameron and revolt against downsizing narratives to a univocal example, and, instead, depict diverse stories that might not conquer death, but advance the idea of becoming wise, not by narrating, but in narrating and thereby achieving certainty. Haug, “Exempelsammlungen im narrativen Rahmen”, 271, 278–282. 105 Haug, “Exempelsammlungen im narrativen Rahmen”, 282. “Das Erzählen in der komplexen Form der Sammlung macht hier nicht nur weise für das Leben aus der Erkenntnis heraus, dass es eine unendliche Vielfalt von Aspekten besitzt, sondern dieses narrative SichVergewissern zeigt sich selbst als eine, ja vielleicht als die höchste Form des Daseins: Also nicht durch Erzählen weise werden für das Leben, sondern leben, um im Erzählen weise zu werden und weise zu sein.”

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and a moral progress. In other words, the novel severs any links between the text and an external verisimilitude: I would not read another line of it, quoth Trim, for all this world;—I fear, an’ please your Honours, all this is in Portugal, where my poor brother Tom is. I tell thee, Trim, again, quoth my father, ’tis not an historical account,—’tis a description.—’Tis only a description, honest man, quoth Slop, there’s not a word of truth in it.——That’s another story, replied my father. (II, xvii, 162)

Trim is reminded of his brother’s fate by Yorick’ sermon condemning the Inquisition’s cruelty. The corporal even goes so far as to place the events in the world. Although for the judicious Walter the events might not belong to their world, there is still an inner verisimilitude that posits a regularity in the development of events. It might not be true in the sense of facts that can be corroborated, but depicts somebody’s reality which is, according to Walter, “another story” about truth.106 The exemplary in Tristram Shandy is comparable to Haug’s and Moos’ definition. Instead of being part of a genre, the exemplary is a rhetorical function that seeks to illustrate, develop and advance a solution to a problem.107 This definition underscores the role of inner verisimilitude or the “probable” within a narration, so the “improbable truth” that Tristram wants to avoid while narrating his story is the extraneous verisimilitude that represents an attack on his autonomy, on his search for certainty beyond an imposed axiology and beyond the prefigurations of literary tradition. The different editorial strategies from the Exempla collections, like Tristram’s narrative agenda, represent a reaction to an external verosimilitude, or in

|| 106 Grubmüller, “Fabel, Exempel, Allegorese”, 61–62. “Aber fest steht schon, dass die Fabel mit dem sog. ‘Exemplum im engeren Sinn’, dem begrifflich isolierbaren und auch historisch zu identifizierenden Typ des argumentativen oder rhetorischen Exemplums wenig gemein haben kann: Dieses Exemplum baut auf die Überzeugungskraft des einmal in der Geschichte faktisch Gewesenen, auf Figuren wie Alexander und Cato und ihre Taten und Reden, die Fabel dagegen lenkt den Blick mit Hilfe ihrer ‘äußeren Unwahrscheinlichkeit’ auf wiedererkennbare Geschehensabläufe; sie sind mit Lessings Begriff der ‘inneren Wahrscheinlichkeit’ gemeint, und da diese gerade durch die ‘programmatische [äußere, K. G.] Unwahrscheinlichkeit’ ins Licht gerückt wird, lässt sich beides (Wahrscheinlichkeit und Unwahrscheinlichkeit) nicht, wie in Stierles Lessing-Kritik, gegeneinander ausspielen. Erst die in der Fabel geleistete Befreiung der Geschehensabfolge aus historischen Wahrscheinlichkeiten, die immer auch Zufälligkeiten sind, macht sie als regelhaft erkennbar.” 107 Haug, “Exempelsammlungen im narrativen Rahmen”, 264–265. Here Haug adheres to Moos’s definition.

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other words, to historical circumstances defining epochal concerns. Sterne via Tristram reacts to his tradition, and, contrary to the most common and stable ways to tell and judge a story, his narrator proposes the line of beauty, the instant where the thoroughly critical but unstable structures of artifice seem actualizable, that is, an instant before one grows weary and falls due to gravity, due to the inescapable force that makes everything sink through the vertical axis and its ideal linearity. Digressions defy gravity. They subvert tradition with misquotations and by putting everything out of context to appropriate ideas transitorily. The textual device of the digression steers away from the construction of a concrete and distinct example that offers a compass for further judgments but upholds the exemplary function. This function is instrumentalized to bypass actions and create a fictional mind narrating in an idiosyncratic manner. All opinions are part of a self-reflexive impetus that fulfils various goals simultaneously: to reveal a moral character predicting actions that will never be narrated, and, at the same time, to hint at the multiple facets that help attain a better understanding of actions and, hence, acquire certainty. Digressions posit partial truths whose addition would, in principle, reveal the true nature of an action.108 But since it is practically impossible to complete such a quest for truth, one can only approach it indirectly, hint at it with the idiosyncratic line of beauty which changes its direction abruptly and makes the reader wonder about the cohesion between its points. This doubt invites the reader to make an ethical-aesthetic judgment based on speculations about the direction that the events and their explanations might have taken. In other words, the reader must interpret the work of art not by trying to determine a meaning, but by delving into the polysemy nourished by indeterminacy.109 Linear thinking is the belligerent enemy of indeterminacy and the peaceful denizens of Shandy Hall. The fastest and most evident interpretation, whether

|| 108 It is an additive truth that never comes to be realized, and it plays an analogous role to the partial truth in Musil’s novel. Haug argues: “Zum einen kann man sie als ein Repertoire für die praktische Applikation ansehen. […] Andererseits jedoch können die Exempla einer Sammlung unabhängig von der Möglichkeit zur Applikation in eine gegenseitige Beziehung treten. Ihre Teilwahrheiten werden dabei intertextuell aufgefangen, indem sie sich ergänzen oder widersprechen. Die ganze Wahrheit stellt sich als die Summe aller beispielhaften Einzelerfahrungen dar.” Haug, “Exempelsammlungen im narrativen Rahmen”, 269. 109 According to Moglen, in Sterne’s novel subjectivity is “a desiring subjectivity that seeks to articulate the absence and loss by which it has been shaped: …” Helene Moglen, “(W)holes and Noses: The Indeterminacies of Tristram Shandy”, in The Trauma of Gender. A Feminist Theory of the Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 88.

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grounded in common sense or a moral character, is the cause of their misunderstandings. This straightforward thinking can even give rise to enmity, as is the case with Yorick and his peer Phutatorius. Both characters were in a theologians’ Council when a hot nut accidentally ended up in Phutatorius’s breeches. Phutatorius interpreted this event as a prank and reprimand: When great or unexpected events fall out upon the stage of this sublunary world——the mind of man, which is an inquisitive kind of substance, naturally takes a flight behind the scenes to see what is the cause and first spring of them.—The search was not long in this instance. It was well known that Yorick had never a good opinion of the treatise which Phutatorius had wrote de Concubinis retinendis, as a thing which he feared had done hurt in the world——and ’twas easily found out, that there was a mystical meaning in Yorick’s prank—and that his chucking the chesnut hot into Phutatorius’s ***——*****, was a sarcastical fling at his book—the doctrines of which, they said, had enflamed many an honest man in the same place. (IV, xxvii, 384)

For “the beards of so many commissaries, officials, advocates, proctors, registers, and of the most eminent of our school-divines,” (IV, xxiii 361) this contrived scheme to undermine a treatise represents – against what a layman might think – an unequivocal attack. In Phutatorius’s howl, some of them “could distinguish the expression and mixture of the two tones as plainly as a third or a fifth,” and others “could not tell what in the world to make of it” (IV, xxvii, 378). But the most complex reading prevailed because the divines piled up enough reasons to deal with contingency and the mysteries of gravity. Apparently, for the assembled scholars it has become second nature to find an allegorical meaning in every action. They apply their acumen not only to books but to their interactions.110 Here, one should add that among them it seems quite natural to hold a grudge, and take advantage of any opportunity to transform it into a counterargument, attack or illustration. If the right elements are involved, the events become transparent. However, this interpretation is opposed to the narrator’s opinion, who repeatedly says it was an accident, or at least refrains from ascribing intentions, and claims “all that concerns me as an historian, is to represent the matter of fact, and render it credible to the reader, that the hiatus in Phutatorius’s breeches was sufficiently wide to receive the chesnut” (IV, xxvii, 381). But the scholars want to overcome contingency and posit a meaning accessible and plausible for everybody. || 110 Moglen also mentions that the straight line represents this way to interpret events. A Straight line only exists within a particular framework and belongs to system-builders likes Walter. Moglen, The philosophical Irony of Laurence Sterne, 97.

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In their interpretation, Phutatorius’ personality and social position are crucial. The assembly knows that he “was somewhat of a cholerick spirit” and “was known to bear no good liking” (IV, xxvii, 378) to Yorick. Given his character and the scholarly dispute with Yorick, nobody in the room doubted that the accident was an intentional action motivated by an ill will. Furthermore, this interpretation prevailed, to the detriment of any critical assessment of the situation, due to Phutatorius’ authority. He symbolizes the past medieval order and “was naturally supposed to know more of the matter than any person besides, his opinion at once became the general one […] “ (IV, xxvii, 384). Another aggravating circumstance was that Yorick picked up the chestnut after Phutatorius tossed it out of his breeches. This manner of asserting ownership alludes to Locke’s theory of appropriation – according to which labor is involved in picking an apple and from this follows property – and underscores the false assumption “that it must have been the owner of the chesnut, and no one else, who could have played him such a prank with it” (IV, xxvii, 384).111 The “real” cause, however, is Phutatorius’s well-known liking for chestnuts. He is a tragic victim of his own rank and authority. Gastripheres, who brought the chestnuts to the table, knew that Phutatorius was “particulary fond of ‘em”, (IV, xxvii, 380) and thus tried to please him by placing them close to him, thereby propitiating the known development. All in all, this scene is a perfect example of the conflict between nature and culture, which characterizes Tristram Shandy. Nature and culture, gravity and personality are in a collision course staged by meta-reflections, since they highlight the rhetorical elements in any account and the various interpretations that can be pinned on an accident. From this collision results a comic pattern. It establishes an ironic mode in which artifice is the genuine perspective. The commonplaces of biographies and the high intertextual density of the novel show that realism is a design easily mixed up, as Trim does, with reality.112 For this reason, the narrator recommends to us, by addressing an imaginary “Madam” in the audience, to read carefully and even to go back and reread a chapter as punishment for overlooking details: || 111 The notes to the Florida edition inform us that “Sterne borrows his discussion from Locke’s chapter on property in Of Civil Government, 2.5. 27–28, in Two Treatises of Government.” New, Davies, and Day, “Tristram Shandy: The Notes”, 264. 112 “Not only on the level of style and action, then, but even in the structure of the novel, Sterne creates a comic conflict of artifice and nature that mocks the fact-minded reader and the detail- bound writer as much as it does the naive corporal or the pedantic Shandys.” William J. Farrell, “Nature Versus Art as a Comic Pattern in Tristram Shandy”, in English Literary History 30 (1963): 35. See also 21, 30.

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—’Tis to rebuke a vicious taste, which has crept into thousands besides herself,—of reading straight forwards, more in quest of the adventures, than of the deep erudition and knowledge which a book of this cast, if read over as it should be, would infallibly impart with them——The mind should be accustomed to make wise reflections, and draw curious conclusions as it goes along; (I, xx, 65)

The entangled structure purposefully keeps the reader on her toes, makes her aware of the possible interpretations and the diverse elements that should be taken into account, e.g., personality, customs, causal explanations, etc. For this approach to a text, a book’s materiality, namely, its first and last pages are unrelated to the contents or fragments of life. Tristram Shandy forces its readers to eschew the mental shortcuts instilled by tradition and urges us to disentangle an intertextual conundrum whose erudition resides not only in well-chosen quotes from the classics, but in inventions, tergiversations, distortions, and even comments that might seem absurd, but which come, like in the following scene, from renowned sources and enhance a motivistic reflection. The Shandy clan also assist to the Council in which Phutatorius was supposedly affronted by Yorick, to find out if Tristram’s baptism could be rendered null. During the discussion, Toby Shandy entreats the scholars to device a reason to nullify the baptism for the sake of their parents. This turns out to be an ungrounded request. “——It has not only been a question, Captain Shandy, amongst the best lawyers and civilians in this land, continued Kysarcius, “Whether the mother be of kin to her child,”—but, after much dispassionate enquiry and jactitation of the arguments on all sides—it has been abjudged for the negative […] “ (IX, xxix, 390). This negative response is a cryptic allusion to Aristoteles: “T‘is a ground and principle in the law, said Triptolemus, that things do not ascend, but descend in it; and I make no doubt ’tis for this cause, that however true it is, that the child may be of the blood and seed of its parents——that the parents, nevertheless, are not of the blood and seed of it; inasmuch as the parents are not begot by the child, but the child by the parents—” (IX, xxix, 392).113 Now, we could ask what about the father? This is hardly a met-

|| 113 In this respect Aristotle says:“Now (1) parents know their offspring better than their children know that they are their children, and (2) the originator feels his offspring to be his own more than the offspring do their begetter; for the product belongs to the producer (e.g. a tooth or hair or anything else to him whose it is), but the producer does not belong to the product, or belongs in a less degree. And (3) the length of time produces the same result; parents love their children as soon as these are born, but the children love their parents only after time has elapse

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aphysical question, but a common possibility. In the novel, there are plenty of allusions casting doubt over Walter being Tristram’s father. Like every item in the novel, this paternity case is characterized by ambiguity and is opposed to the straight line, or in this case, to the bloodline that should naturally follow gravity’s trajectory and go downwards according to the order established by the unmoved mover. But lineage is not only a question for people. The straight line also represents the direct and sober quotation which is not supposed to take ideas out of context but reproduce them verbatim or at least consider if they apply to a particular context. This, however, would never help attain a critical and independent view. Tristram is not keen on adhering to tradition. His poetics are “irregular” and could never satisfy a critic’s measured expectations: “And what of this new book the whole world makes such a rout about?——Oh! ’tis out of all plumb, my lord,——quite an irregular thing!—not one of the angles at the four corners was a right angle.—I had my rule and compasses, &c., my lord, in my pocket.— Excellent critick!” (III, xii, 213). To be “out of plumb” in the sense of not exactly vertical might allude to Trim, frozen in the instant in which his silhouette reveals the line of beauty, a gesture that abides to the laws of nature just long enough to trick them before falling. Without a plumb weighing down the narrative and straightening its threads, one could end up with a picture immune to gravity, voided of a principle whose weight would allow a predefined meaning to sink into a person’s mind and make the world transparent, intelligible. The vertical line has been rendered ineffective. The subtle inclination of Trim’s body grants freedom to explore, for a second, the wideness of the horizontal realm. Here, the most common tools to measure its dimensions are also ineffective. The structure is irregular, so its mystery does not reside in its right angles nor in the ability to put them in a common scale. Tristram Shandy is rather the story that one keeps to one self, since it defies tradition and is the contrary of the Slawkenbergius tale, which “has its Protasis, Epitasis, Catastasis, its Catastrophe or Peripetia growing one out of the other in it, in the order Aristotle first planted them——without which a tale had better never be told at all, says Slawkenbergius, but be kept to a man’s self” (IV, Slawkenbergius Tale, 317). This embedded story thematizes the arbitrariness of meaning,114 and, according to Tristram, it was formulated with a wide audience in mind. Conversely, Tristram’s endeavour is an intimate account, a confession

|| and they have acquired understanding or the power to discrimination by the sense.” Aristotle, “The Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle”, (1161b19–1162a6). 114 Moglen, The philosophical Irony of Laurence Sterne, 13.

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not appropriate for all ears nor aiming to become a perfect composition. It is the story of a Self that seeks to tailor a judgment when confronted with tradition’s constraints. In a moment of despair, or maybe as a cry for understanding, Tristram’s Self deplores the persistent adherence to forms thusly: Tell me, ye learned, shall we for ever be adding so much to the bulk—so little to the stock? Shall we for ever make new books, as apothecaries make new mixtures, by pouring only out of one vessel into another? Are we for ever to be twisting, and untwisting the same rope? for ever in the same track— for ever at the same pace? Shall we be destined to the days of eternity, on holy-days, as well as working-days, to be shewing the relicks of learning, as monks do the relicks of their saints—without working one—one single miracle with them? Who made MAN, with powers which dart him from earth to heaven in a moment—that great, that most excellent, and most noble creature of the world—the miracle of nature, as Zoroaster in his book περι φύσεως called him—the Shekinah of the divine presence, as Chrysostom——the image of God, as Moses——the ray of divinity, as Plato—the marvel of marvels, as Aristotle—to go sneaking on at this pitiful—pimping—pettifogging rate? (V, I, 408)

Weary of infecund and impotent scholarship, the narrator has fallen to his knees in supplication. This gesture is a reaction to the accumulated ages of learning that reached stagnation and became an incessant repetition of the same elements, the same discussions. The learned are just amassing knowledge like the scientists in Ulrich’s world, without ever breaking their mould to bring a new item or unprecedented form to the “stock.” But for the narrator it is time to embrace the Copernican revolution, so he urges us – with a wording that might remind us of Pico della Mirandola – to exploit the miraculous inner principle and produce a unique book of the self, to reveal the miracle that is Man. This individual, however, should be represented with a critical biography that includes life in its multiple facets and their complex interrelationships, which makes it impossible to deliver a book about a self with no irregularities or saliences whatsoever. On these grounds, the narrator challenges his detractors: I defy, notwithstanding all that has been said upon straight lines in sundry pages of my book—I defy the best cabbage planter that ever existed, whether he plants backwards or forwards, it makes little difference in the account (except that he will have more to answer for in the one case than in the other)—I defy him to go on coolly, critically, and canonically, planting his cabbages one by one, in straight lines, and stoical distances, especially if slits in petticoats are unsew’d up—without ever and anon straddling out, or sidling into some bastardly digression——In Freeze-land, Fog-land, and some other lands I wot of—it may be done—— But in this clear climate of fantasy and perspiration, where every idea, sensible and insensible, gets vent—in this land, my dear Eugenius—in this fertile land of

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chivalry and romance, where I now sit, unskrewing my ink-horn to write my uncle Toby’s amours, […] (VIII, i, 655)

The mention of the stoical cabbage planter is an allusion to Montaigne’s Essay “Que philosopher c’est apprendre à mourir”,115 and it serves Tristram to state that he wishes to give an account of his deeds and will keep on going with his profession as a writer, disregarding the imperfections of his blooming style and never ending his story because death will find him first. To conclude a story might be possible for a sober personality, but Tristram’s temperamental style depends on the environment and on the humors that engender a melancholic, phlegmatic, or choleric worldview. Here, the motif of the straight line touches upon the Shandean definition of life and hints at the indomitable writing mind, and the role of tradition and circumstances. This becomes evident with the next fragment: “The gardener, whom I shall now call the muleteer, was a little, hearty, broad-set, good-natured, chattering, toping kind of a fellow, who troubled his head very little with the hows and whens of life;” (VII, xxi, 608). By transforming poor Montaigne from a gardener to a muleteer, Sterne pays a Shandean tribute to one of his influences and reminds us of his definition of life. These connections between motifs construct the coherence of the digressive novel and provide good arguments for W. Booth’s appraisal of the novel’s structure, concurring that Sterne did end his novel, since “there can be little question that even as he wrote the first volume he had a fairly clear idea of what his final volume—whatever its eventual number—would contain.”116 Apart from the fact that Sterne always planned to substitute Tristram’s life with Toby’s amorous exploits,117 the digressive personality, posited as a matrix that can incessantly produce content to incessantly approach certainty, represents an aesthetic principle that can take advantage of a publication in many installments. This editorial circumstance provides his work with enough flexibility to adapt to the de-

|| 115 This allusion is pointed out in New, Davies, and Day, “Tristram Shandy: The Notes”, 498. And the original reminds us of Tristram’s best intentions to narrate actions: “Nous sommes nés pour agir : Cum moriar, medium solvar et inter opus. Je veux qu’on agisse, et qu’on allonge les offices de la vie tant qu’on peut, et que la mort me treuve plantant mes chous, mais nonchalant d’elle, et encore plus de mon jardin imparfait.” Michel de Montaigne, “Que philosopher c’est apprendre à mourir”, in Les Essais, vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1950), 191. 172–207 116 Wayne Booth, “Did Sterne Complete Tristram Shandy?”, in Modern Philology 48, no. 3 (1951): 174. 117 Booth, “Did Sterne Complete Tristram Shandy?”, 181.

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mands of his public and his pocket, but also to provide a potentially endless narration. The impossibility of ending the story is an inherent structural feature and its eccentricity – visible in the sudden changes of topics and voices – is the consequence of a plan. One can even venture to claim that his intention was never to uphold the plot’s primacy, since he is not dealing with a fable, but with a story about the Self with character construction at its core. For this reason, the straight line with its traditional points of departure and end cannot make Tristram Shandy into a whole. The different aspects of the straight line as a pervasive thought pattern are summarized in the following fragment, where the narrator implicitly confesses his utter failure: If I mend at this rate, it is not impossible——by the good leave of his grace of Benevento’s devils——but I may arrive hereafter at the excellency of going on even thus: which is a line drawn as straight as I could draw it, by a writing-master’s ruler (borrowed for that purpose), turning neither to the right hand or to the left. This right line,—the path-way for Christians to walk in! say divines—— ——The emblem of moral rectitude! says Cicero—— ——The best line! say cabbage planters——is the shortest line, says Archimedes, which can be drawn from one given point to another.—— I wish your ladyships would lay this matter to heart, in your next birth-day suits! ——What a journey! Pray can you tell me,—that is, without anger, before I write my chapter upon straight lines——by what mistake——who told them so——or how it has come to pass, that your men of wit and genius have all along confounded this line, with the line of GRAVITATION? (VI, xl, 572)

Tristram reminds us that right now he is invested in writing down his history and could mend his craftmanship, or maybe mend his life and enter the Christian straight path. He may even be claiming that it is “not impossible.” But despite possessing the critic’s tools, the line he draws is as straight as his ability to manipulate tradition allows. In other words, it is not straight at all. A line is either straight or not and it is not a question of drawing a line as straight as one could. Tristram’s line cannot be the “right” line, nor “the emblem of rectitude”, or the best line.118 Rather, he flees from the semantic infection at which the novel points with the simple mention of gravitation. This law represents a world || 118 In an analysis of the materiality of words and how it affects meaning, S. Burkhardt argues that the line of gravitation, that is, the theoretically straight line, is what separates him from “moral rectitude.” Burckhardt, “Tristram Shandy’s Law of Gravity”, 80.

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order, but as a symbol it has overstepped its reign. Its encroachment makes it possible for a straight line to become the right line, to continue expanding its arbitrary geometrical rule and govern the narrative structures striving to set a commendable ethical example. The straight line thus stands for a thought pattern which instils ideas. This pattern, however, conflicts with the modern critical standards set by Tristram. His truth does not reside in religious authority, nor in the sheer coherence of systematization: “My father, whose way was to force every event in nature into an hypothesis, by which means never man crucified Truth at the rate he did” (IX, xxxii, 804). Walter might have drifted away from the religious order of the world, but he still attempted to build a consistent cosmovision, whereas Tristram revels in his finite, imperfectible, incompletable, irregular perspective. For him, exactly as for Toby’s unquenchable thirst for knowledge on sieges, “Endless is the search of Truth” (II, ii, 103).

2.4.3 Imaginary lines, perspectives and Ulrich’s vanishing point of becoming 2.4.3.1 Imaginary straight lines and poetic autonomy Tristram intertwines unusual associations with a wide range of stylistic devices to dynamite the presuppositions entailed by the straight line as a rhetorical, generic and fictional device. Straightness stands for the most conventional means to depict reality, which sometimes misses its target and ends up in irony, in scenes where the uttered words and their intended meaning is irreconcilable with the actual circumstance in which they are enmeshed.119 While straight lines lead, in Tristram Shandy, directly to ambiguity, Musil’s novel develops a motivistic discussion around linear narration in a similar vein and even goes one step further by hinting at a solution, or the next logical step in this progression, namely, the role of taste when it is confronted with straight, sinuous, circular, oblique, and broken lines.

|| 119 Here I am linking the straight line to what E. Hnatko identified as characteristic features of the novel’s elusive style, which “may well be attributed to a complexity arising from the combination of several language devices. Such devices seem to grow out of four basic principles: a deliberate confounding of a conventional means of representing a mode of reality with the reality itself; an extensive use of what would have been to neoclassic critics heterogeneous terms engaged in similitude; a peculiar irony growing out of an adopted “blind spot”; and, finally, closely related in many ways to the first three, a displacement of emphasis on some aspect of discourse. The principles are, in a sense, interrelated as aspects of the same basic approach and may all be seen as a “falseness” of wit.” Eugene Hnatko, “Tristram Shandy’ Wit”, in The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 65, no. 1 (1966): 47.

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The argumentation in the following subchapters will lead to the reflections upon taste in the next chapter, 2.5, but to reach that point, a discussion that interrelates autonomy, biographical accounts, orientation, perception, and the choice between a concrete generalization and an abstract generalization is necessary. First, let us remember some aspects of the Gleichnis, in order to contextualize the motif of the straight line. The Gleichnis at reality’s core implies unformed experiences which can be diversely interpreted to attain diverse truths. It is the propelling force that grounds the novel’s multi-perspectivism and undermines the most common thought pattern, that is, the straight line.120 Although the Gleichnis might be transformed into scientific truth as well as into the sober and precise line of matter-of-fact narration, its force does not reside in its ability to fix a meaning, but in its possibilities, in the imprecisions that allow a skeptic to become a possibilitarian, as well as to enable the reality-driven citizen to lead a life: Vielleicht beflügelte eine gewisse Ungenauigkeit und Gleichnishaftigkeit, bei der man weniger an die Wirklichkeit denkt als sonst, nicht nur das Gefühl des Grafen Leinsdorf. Denn Ungenauigkeit hat eine erhebende und vergrößernde Kraft. Es scheint, daß der brave, praktische Wirklichkeitsmensch die Wirklichkeit nirgends restlos liebt und ernst nimmt. Als Kind kriecht er unter den Tisch, um das Zimmer der Eltern, wenn sie nicht zu Hause sind, durch diesen genialen einfachen Trick abenteuerlich zu machen; er sehnt sich als Knabe nach der Uhr; als Jüngling mit der goldenen Uhr nach der zu ihr passenden Frau; als Mann mit Uhr und Frau nach der gehobenen Stellung; und wenn er glücklich diesen kleinen Kreis von Wünschen zustande gebracht hat und ruhig darin hin und her schwingt wie ein Pendel, scheint sich dennoch sein Vorrat unbefriedigter Träume um nichts verringert zu haben. Denn wenn er sich erheben will, so gebraucht er dann ein Gleichnis. (MoE 138)

With simple strokes, the narrator depicts the different stages in the life of the Wirklichkeitsmensch. Parables have always kept him company, but without overstepping decorous boundaries. This type of person does not wish to realize all his fantasies, “aber poetisch erregt es ihn” (MoE 139). While some images motivate him through life, there are others that must remain unrealized or as || 120 “Durch den Gebrauch von Metaphern und Gleichnissen eröffnet sich danach die Möglichkeit, linear strukturierte Bedeutungsmuster, wie sie das ‘normale’, begriffsorientierte Denken zwangsläufig induziert, aufzubrechen, um sie – im Sinne des multiperspektivischen Wahrheitsanspruchs – transparent werden zu lassen für ‘andere’ Bedeutungszusammenhänge.” Volkmar Altmann, Totalität und Perspektive. Zum Wirklichkeitsbegriff Robert Musils im Mann ohne Eigenschaften (Frankfurt a. M.: Lang, 1992), 95.

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inconsistencies between actions and decisions, as specks of irrationality. And still, this individual is pragmatically happy with his disassociation and is not distressed by doubts about his choices, nor by the ironic mode in which his life develops. But the problem with inconsistencies is suspended if one cuts loose the individual from the requirements of the observable and approaches a person as if she or he were a Gleichnis and at the same time an immanent principle that renders the world intelligible. Such is Ulrich’s sudden realization almost at the end of the first book: “Ein entsprungenes Gleichnis der Ordnung: das war Moosbrugger für ihn!” (MoE 653). That one can relate to a person as if he were a Gleichnis is already implied in the previous example, in which any biographical account, real or not, represents one of the fantastical settings used by the Wirklichkeitsmench to escape stagnation: “denn es kommt ihm anscheinend nur darauf an, etwas zu dem zu machen, was es nicht ist, was wohl ein Beweis dafür ist, daß er nirgends lange aushält, wo immer er sich befinde” (MoE 139). The consequence of this observation is that reality and the straight line as thought pattern depict a life but never reveal the fantasy that brings it into motion. Similarly, Moosbrugger’s first and foremost enemy is the straight line as a thought pattern that defines his case and trial. The presupposed common sense precludes a way to apprehend him independently of the idea of a progression towards a foreseeable outcome: “Vor der Justiz lag alles, was nacheinander so natürlich gewesen war, sinnlos nebeneinander in ihm, und er bemühte sich mit den größten Anstrengungen, einen Sinn hineinzubringen, der der Würde seiner vornehmen Gegner in nichts nachstehen sollte” (MoE 76). Moosbrugger must endeavor to show that his judges’ presuppositions are fundamentally wrong. What appears to be a concatenation of events reproducing actions that realize evident intentions, is the misinterpretation of Moosbrugger’s world. However, a compass in this world can hardly be postulated because of his inaccessible “I” that serves as his own epistemological grounding: [A]ber Moosbrugger hatte den ungünstigeren Stand, denn seine seltsamen Schattengründe hätte auch ein Klügerer nicht ausdrücken können. Sie kamen unmittelbar aus dem verwirrt Einsamen seines Lebens, und während alle anderen Leben hundertfach bestehen – in der gleichen Weise gesehn von denen, die sie führen, wie von allen anderen, die sie bestätigen – war sein wahres Leben nur für ihn vorhanden. (MoE 75–76)

His uniqueness and singularity stand in the way of a conventional interpretation grounded in common sense and deliberation within a society. But as we know, Moosbrugger responds to another set of rules, not to reasons but to motives.

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Brigitte Weingart establishes this opposition and argues that motivation emanates from the collective imagination, from culture and the feeling of participation that was discussed by one of Musil’s sources, Levy Bruhl.121 Exactly as the straight line in literature, motives refer to situations with circumstances, but are also literary forms carried throughout the times. They are, hence, also motifs that define the plot.122 The cultural link between motivation and motif advances a framework contrasting with causal explanations and giving reasons for actions. Motives surpass the rational framework because reason and causality represent a reduction of complexity, the stagnation of mental life into an opinion that, due to pragmatic impositions, must become a decision. Although both novels undermine rationality with this argument, there is still a fundamental difference: while an associative mind endeavors to accumulate items and even could attempt to line up feelings and impressions, mystical participation merges all the elements into a single moment that attains totality.123 Notwithstanding, the associative mind and the mystic merging represent comparable figures for Kakania’s imagination: “Früher hat man ja wohl von Gedankenflug gesprochen, und zur Zeit Schillers wäre ein Mann mit solchen hochgemuten Fragen im Busen sehr angesehen gewesen; heute dagegen hat man das Gefühl, daß mit so einem Menschen etwas nicht in Ordnung sei, wenn das nicht gerade zufällig sein Beruf ist und seine Einkommensquelle” (MoE 358). Those who fall prey to the associative mind fall under suspicion of diminished responsibility, unless, of course, their whimsical character is tolerated by society as a byproduct of their works, as the professional deformation of the voyeuristic writer who is incontinent and cannot behave like the rest of society and its muleteers, gardeners and cabbage planters “who troubled his head very little with the hows and whens of life” (VII, xxi, 608). Although one could be tempted to add Moosbrugger to this list, he embodies a liminal case. His struggle intersects with Tristram’s narrative endeavor, but Moosbrugger is neither interested in circumstances nor in tradition. Fortunately, Ulrich can relieve

|| 121 Brigitte Weingart, “Verbindungen, Vorverbindungen. Zur Poetik der ‘Partizipation’ (LévyBruhl) bei Musil”, in Medien, Technik, Wissenschaft. Wissensübertragung bei Robert Musil und in seiner Zeit, ed. Ulrich J. Beil, Michael Gamper, Karl Wagner (Zürich: Chronos, 2011), 19, 22. 122 “Als literarische tradierte Erzählelemente, die vom Umfang her der Handlung untergeordnet sind, liefern Motive nicht nur den Stoff für bestimmte Situationen, sondern auch Beweggründe für den weiteren Verlauf; sie greifen also durchaus (‘bewegend’) in die narrative Struktur ein.” Weingart, “Verbindungen, Vorverbindungen“, 20. 123 “Die Partizipation lässt sich nicht auf den rationalen Vorgang der Ideenassoziation zurückführen, da Gefühle und Vorstellungen in ihr verschmelzen” Weingart, “Verbindungen, Vorverbindungen“, 29.

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Moosbrugger from his duties in this comparison, exonerate him and face the charges of literary collusion. At some point, Ulrich considers taking up the challenge of taming tradition and mind: “Ulrich entwickelte das Programm, Ideengeschichte statt Weltgeschichte zu leben. Der Unterschied, schickte er voraus, läge zunächst weniger in dem, was geschähe, als in der Bedeutung, die man ihm gäbe, in der Absicht, die man mit ihm verbände, in dem System, das das einzelne Geschehnis umfinge” (MoE 364).124 To counter the encroaching Seinesgleichen – whose systematizing impetus, energized by measurability, can characterize every single event as repetition – Ulrich proposes to shatter the positivistic shackles by instating a new meaning, a new symbolic order from which to relate the same event. This is no simple task though. The ideal domain is equally susceptible to the malady of Seinesgleichen: Das jetzt geltende System sei das der Wirklichkeit und gleiche einem schlechten Theaterstück. Man sage nicht umsonst Welttheater, denn es erstehen immer 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; man mordet sogar in neunzig von hundert Fällen nur deshalb, weil es für tragisch und großartig gehalten wird. (MoE 364)

The conclusion that Ulrich draws from this situation is: daß nichts für die Ideen geschieht. Man könne es kurz so zusammenfassen, behauptete er, daß es uns zu wenig darauf ankäme, was geschehe, und zuviel darauf, wem, wo und wann es geschehe, so daß uns nicht der Geist der Geschehnisse, sondern ihre Fabel, nicht die Erschließung neuen Lebensgehalts, sondern die Verteilung des schon vorhandenen wichtig seien, genau so, wie es wirklich dem Unterschied von guten und bloß erfolgreichen Stücken entspreche. (MoE 364)

Not only their position with respect to a traditionally defined plot but also both protagonists’ concern with historiography as craftsmanship makes them bemoan their lot and complain about generic constraints. While one asks: “shall

|| 124 Interesting, in this context, is that Heydebrand underscores the variegated mental life in Musil’s essayistic novel: “So wird ein Thema von vielen Seiten her beleuchtet, ein Problem auf mehreren Ebenen der Abstraktion erörtert; es kann in einer okkasionellen Bemerkung, im Gedankenblitz oder in der ausgesponnenen Reflexion, in einer provokativen Formel oder einer experimentierenden Theorie, im anschaulichen Beispiel oder in der abstrakten Darlegung, in der verhüllenden Anspielung oder im offenen Bekenntnis sich formulieren.” v. Heydebrand, Die Reflexionen Ulrichs, 5.

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we for ever be adding so much to the bulk—so little to the stock?” (V, I, 408), the other echoes: “Es fällt den Autoren nichts Neues ein, und sie schreiben einer vom anderen ab” (MoE 360). For Ulrich, this systemic plagiarism resembles a children’s game of telephone, in which the message is arbitrarily tampered with. The amputated messages fail to convey a state of affairs which is long gone. It has nothing to do with the actuality that has been transformed by the contingency that affects both historical events and writing about them. Contingency is part of the historiographer’s experience of writing and, despite Arnheim’s good wishes, it is possible that reason and history, at least privately, will not coincide every time: “ [I]n der Weltgeschichte geschieht nichts Unvernünftiges.” “In der Welt aber doch so viel?” “In der Weltgeschichte niemals!” (MoE 174)

Arnheim denies the irony of the modern world. He believes in the possible harmony between reason and world, which is the effect of a general situation, a progressive gain that can end in the unity sought by Diotima and the Parallel Campaign. For her, Arnheim represents this encroaching idea of the general: Arnheim sei ein Europäer, ein in ganz Europa bekannter Geist; und gerade weil er kein Österreicher sei, beweise man durch seine Teilnahme, daß der Geist als solcher in Österreich Heimat habe, und plötzlich stellte sie die Behauptung auf, das wahre Österreich sei die ganze Welt. Die Welt, erläuterte sie, werde nicht eher Beruhigung finden, als die Nationen in ihr so in höherer Einheit leben wie die österreichischen Stämme in ihrem Vaterland. (MoE 174)

Arnheim’s books are also praised by the diverse specialists despite some neglectable imprecisions. His opinion represents the all-encompassing average that can formulate an opinion on any topic, and, at the same time, he embodies money and its order. He can put a price on everything and buy it. However, in this discussion with Ulrich, Arnheim makes a concession that leaves at least two possibilities which maintain the chasm between an ideal world and events: either historiographers do not include the absurd or such events could never affect world history. Ulrich is more inclined to see the obstacles for historical progress in human hands, so he adds one personality trait to the aforementioned problems: “Dazu gehört aber noch etwas, was bisher nicht erwähnt worden, und das ist nichts anderes als die Freude an der Geschichte; es gehört jene den Autoren so geläufige Überzeugung hinzu, daß man eine gute Geschichte mache, die Leidenschaft des Autors, die seine Ohren glühend verlängert und jede Kritik einfach wegschmilzt” (MoE 514). Historians seem to compete with

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their international peers, and instead of thinking about the imperfections of their land, as he argued in his school essay, for historians writing history is more akin to creating a “good” story, a positive appraisal and a coherent narration. This does not only apply to world history though. Ulrich is interested in history in the same sense that Tristram considers himself the historian of his own life: “Ich sage Geschichte, aber ich meine, wenn Sie sich erinnern, unser Leben” (MoE 362). In view of all the problems that the historiographical endeavor entails, Ulrich proposes: “man sollte ungefähr so leben, wie man lese” (MoE 368). This promising method, however, is only the incipient reflection that will eventually take the form of a poetic solution in order to challenge the straight line as a guiding principle. The poetic path is neither the only one, nor is it a definitive solution, but it unfolds a problematic comparable to Tristram Shandy’s humanist vein. The impossibility of smoothing out the differences between the ideal dimension and the factual dimension is the point of departure for the narrative discussion enacted in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften. This topic is not only discussed in relation to fables and world history, but also regards the Parallel Campaign or Parallelaktion. The second element of this compound word makes us expect the actions of a secret society working in the shadows to counterpoint the official actions. But the parallel campaign’s ineffectual fate was sealed with its baptism, exactly in the same manner as Tristram, whose name, amputated and subsequently cobbled back together, placed him between Trismegistus and Tristan – between a divine source of wisdom and a wounded passionate lover – turning him into the impotent hobbyhorsical lover who can only produce patchworks and pastiches. The names predetermine their possibilities. What the Parallel Campaign strived for will never come to be since it does not designate an alternative action, but the parallel life of the spirit. This parallel pertains to the old worldview and its unified spatio-temporal framework, so, following Euclidian geometry, the parallel lines will never touch. The parallel campaign represents thus the impossibility to attain consistency between actions and decisions, or in other words, represents irony in Ulrich’s world. To palliate this condition, one can delve into Moosbrugger’s case, whose solution might seem anachronistic, since it hints at the epic and aims at totality, or into the poetic alternative. The burden that the straight line represents for a narrator is not restricted to its positivistic constraints or to a matter-of-fact mode of narration. In principle, a narrator or a person seeking autonomy, like Ulrich, must overcome the straight line because it is a thought pattern external to individual reflections.

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For this reason, one could reach the end of a lifetime without being able to claim agency over a single action.125 Ulrich discusses this issue in a protracted train of thought: “Mit wenig Übertreibung durfte er darum von seinem Leben sagen, daß sich alles darin so vollzogen habe, wie wenn es mehr zueinander gehörte als zu ihm. Auf A war immer B gefolgt, ob das nur im Kampf oder in der Liebe geschah” (MoE 148). Here, there is a reminder of Ulrich’s attempt to become a bedeutender Mensch by serving in the cavalry. During that time, he also had a love affair with a major’s wife, his first big love story that, in retrospect, made him realize that the love was actually for himself or within him: “Es dauerte nicht lange, da war sie ganz zum unpersönlichen Kraftzentrum, zum versenkten Dynamo seiner Erleuchtungsanlage geworden, und er schrieb ihr einen letzten Brief, worin er ihr auseinandersetzte, daß das große Zu-Liebe-leben eigentlich gar nichts mit Besitz und dem Wunsche Seimein zu tun habe, die aus der Sphäre des Sparens, Aneignens und der Freßsucht stammten” (MoE 126). This bitter end to a passionate love story supports Ulrich’s stance before tradition: to abandon an already available design for life is to bid farewell to traditional plots, to the Bildungsroman,126 and to the idea of leading a life. On the other hand, the straight line was transformed into a far more arbitrary pattern: the alphabet. Its regularity originates in tradition, but most of all it is established thanks to repetition. In school, together with the composition of water, one learns the alphabet by rote. By repeatedly reciting, one carves in the mind a conduit, whose invisible furrows harden with time till its progression becomes a reflex waiting to be triggered. The bottom line here is that to stop questioning the most common patterns equals a loss of agency and, in the worst-case scenario, this relation to life might end up in a carnage:

|| 125 “Ulrichs tiefgreifende und grundsätzliche Vorbehalte gegen die Welt des ‘Seinesgleichen geschieht’, die ihn letztlich dazu bewegen, ‘ein Jahr Urlaub vom Leben’ zu nehmen (1, 47), gründen in der Einsicht, dass die hochgradige Interdependenz aller Lebenszusammenhänge und die damit untrennbar einhergehende Rationalisierung und Standardisierung der sozialen Verkehrsformen die Handlungsspielräume der Individuen nicht nur schematisieren und einengen, sondern realiter vollständig außer Kraft setzen.” Altmann, Totalität und Perspektive, 29. 126 Fleig, Körperkultur und Moderne, 239, 245; Honold, Die Stadt und der Krieg, 52, 92, 309.

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“[…] In Wahrheit können sie einander ebenso kaltblütig morden, wie herzlich miteinander auskommen. Unsere Zeit nimmt die Geschehnisse und Abenteuer, von denen sie voll ist, ja sicher nicht ernst. Geschehen sie, so erregen sie. Sie stiften dann auch sogleich neue Geschehnisse, ja eine Art Blutrache von solchen, ein Zwangsalphabet des B- bis Z-Sagens, weil man A gesagt hat. Aber diese Geschehnisse unseres Lebens haben weniger Leben als ein Buch, weil sie keinen zusammenhängenden Sinn haben.” (MoE 900)

In Ulrich’s opinion, nobody in a society blinded by a sole mode of reasoning invests time on pondering and extracting allegorical contents and possibilities from the most common interpretation of events. Nobody looks at the adventure they entail. Events are assumed to open one single course of action, which in dire situations impels to be followed to its final consequences. One acts like the akrates, blinded by revenge, or like the forensic scientists in charge of the Moosbrugger case, who revel in cruelty justified by the objective and neutral gaze of their science. They indulge in counting all the stabs on a dead body, as they would, perhaps, kill somebody if the circumstances motivated them. When one says or hears “A”, autonomy and accountability vanish. Therefore, one could be tempted to talk about events independently from any agent, and claim, as the passage does, that they belong to the times. They simply happen, like an ever-unfolding plot. In view of this, Ulrich proposes to consider the metaphorical side of the events, wherein lies the sense that has a cohesive role and grounds any claim on agency and ethics. The reduction of meaning implied by the straight line not only affects interpretation and autonomy but can even lead to a situation where an agent can be eliminated from the equation without affecting our appraisal. In a world with attributes serving as functions and with individuals assuming roles that could be fulfilled by anybody, actions belong to each other and to the alphabetical framework or literary genre, not to the individual that enacts them and thinks according to what he knows is in his or her hands. There is no room for a momentary appropriation of an action nor of its meaning. The involved attributes do not belong to anyone: “Und so mußte er wohl auch glauben, daß die persönlichen Eigenschaften, die er dabei erwarb, mehr zueinander als zu ihm gehörten, ja jede einzelne von ihnen hatte, wenn er sich genau prüfte, mit ihm nicht inniger zu tun als mit anderen Menschen, die sie auch besitzen mochten” (MoE 148). The problem here does not consist in a thirst to possess, but in the fact that one might end up becoming extraneous to oneself: [O]hne Zweifel wird man trotzdem durch sie bestimmt und besteht aus ihnen, auch wenn man mit ihnen nicht einerlei ist, und so kommt man sich manchmal im ruhenden Verhalten genau so fremd vor wie im bewegten. Wenn Ulrich hätte sagen sollen, wie er eigent-

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lich sei, er wäre in Verlegenheit geraten, denn er hatte sich so wie viele Menschen noch nie anders geprüft als an einer Aufgabe und im Verhältnis zu ihr. Sein Selbstbewusstsein war weder beschädigt worden, noch war es verzärtelt und eitel, und es kannte nicht das Bedürfnis nach jener Wiederinstandsetzung und Ölung, die man Gewissenserforschung nennt. (MoE 148–149)

The actions we undertake change us in such a manner that, at the end of the road, we become strangers to ourselves. We react and take a path surreptitiously imposed, or rather, impinged upon us. From this perspective, everybody is assessed in relation to a task defined by an extraneous framework, a panoramic perspective. In this world, the question of whether one has a good conscience is superfluous, and certainty is a word that does not cross anybody’s mind. One must only decide whether or not to follow a road and its end; certainty is grounded in a pre-established plot. 2.4.3.2 Biographical perspectives and their vanishing points In an ideal situation, continuity is just as evident as the stages of a path seen from above. However, Ulrich eschews the vantage or panoramic perspective granted by the old worldview. His perspective changes but remains close to the ground. He cannot see the different paths and their destinations, nor the stages that would allow him to recognize their progression and continuity. Ulrich has always had a problematic relation to his own history, which is thematized in his memory triggered by an image of his childhood. In this memory, he sees himself bearing a countenance that evokes the expectations a child raises, expectations that appear distant and unrelated to his life: Wer diesen Eindruck erlebt hat, daß ihm seine Person, in einen gewesenen Augenblick der Selbstzufriedenheit gehüllt, aus alten Bildern entgegenblickte, als wäre ein Bindemittel ausgetrocknet oder abgefallen, wird das Gefühl verstehen, mit dem er sich die Frage vorlegte, wie dieses Bindemittel denn eigentlich beschaffen sei, daß es bei anderen nicht versage. (MoE 648)

With a defeatist tone, or maybe coming to terms with the character trait that feeds his penchant for dissections, Ulrich acknowledges that he is a failure, a misfit, a Versager; just because he cannot recognize the continuity in his own life nor identify its place in a broader historical process. Ulrich’s mind is too digressive to be able to follow a simple line. He is constantly unfocussed, so one could fairly claim that this character trait is what makes him a good-for-nothing

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without a cause to uphold; good-for-nothing but free to go astray until he must stop and raise his head to see his surroundings and orientate himself: Er befand sich nun in einer der Baumanlagen, die als ein unterbrochener Ring der Linie folgen, wo früher die Wälle waren, und hätte sie mit wenigen Schritten durchqueren können, aber der große Streif Himmels, der sich der Länge nach über den Bäumen dehnte, verlockte ihn, abzubiegen und seiner Richtung zu folgen, wobei er sich dem überaus privat wirkenden Lichterkranz, der die winterlichen Anlagen, die er durchschritt, himmlisch zurückgezogen umschwebte, immerfort zu nähern schien, ohne ihm näher zu kommen. (MoE 648)

Instead of easily crossing a tree line, its mesmeric powers act on Ulrich and lure him in their direction, that is, into a digression. The line is foreign to the path or course of his reflections. And still he starts following the vestiges that mark the different epochs and their continuity. The trees have taken the place of the wall as a reminder of the past bellicose world and its hierarchical order. In the present, there is still a line, but it is an intermittent, perhaps more flexible order that has been disguised with nature. Perhaps the tree line represents the malleable order grounded in probability and science as well as in the undifferentiated matter of the Gleichnis. But more important is that it was not the line per se that attracted Ulrich, but the promise above it. The optical illusion revealing a light crown, an aureole suspended in mid-air symbolizes a transcendental order, or the infinite goal entailed by a line. Ulrich never reaches a vantage point in his walks and what he can see from his ground position is a mirage. But despite Ulrich’s fundamental skepticism, thanks to his walk along the tree line he reaches a flimsy certainty or acquires a temporary conviction. Now he knows where to search for the cohesive force he lacks, as well as for an answer to Arnheim, who asked him, before he set out on his way home: “Glauben Sie denn, daß das Leben vom Geist regulierbar ist?!” (MoE 646). The straight line is a thought pattern that regulates mental activities and for Ulrich it is just a form among many: “Es ist eine Art perspektivischer Verkürzung des Verstandes,” sagte er sich “was diesen allabendlichen Frieden zustandebringt, der in seiner Erstreckung von einem zum andern Tag das dauernde Gefühl eines mit sich selbst einverstandenen Lebens ergibt. Denn der Menge nach ist es ja beiweitem nicht die Hauptvoraussetzung des Glücks, Widersprüche zu lösen, sondern sie verschwinden zu machen, wie sich in einer langen Allee die Lücken schließen, und so, wie sich allenthalben die sichtbaren Verhältnisse für das Auge verschieben, daß ein von ihm beherrschtes Bild entsteht, worin das Dringende und Nahe groß erscheint, weiter weg aber selbst das Ungeheuerliche klein, Lücken sich schließen und endlich das Ganze eine ordentliche glatte Rundung erfährt […].” (MoE 648–649)

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The binding agent that Ulrich was looking for unfolds like a perspective reduction in which the mind compensates for the interruptions between the trees to trace a continuous line and spark off a feeling of continuity, a peaceful feeling grounded in a gaze that neglects irregularities. A personal narrative identity is constructed by resorting to a similar process. One should dissolve incongruences, select and underscore events that allow one to identify a development, and perhaps even reveal how one was able to lead a life. This type of story complies with the Aristotelian primacy of plot over character.127 However, Musil’s novel attacks any structuring principle striving to construct a plot from which necessity springs, as well as a narrative thread that dissolves incongruences. To fully understand the relationship between space and narration and follow Musil’s essayistic argument, it is necessary to discuss the spatial framework in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften. By grappling with spatiality, the novel develops the conflict between simultaneity and succession, between the panoramic view of society and the Bildungsroman. According to Alexander Honold, the narrative is not structured around a protagonist or time, but around fragments that open a vast space.128 The binding agent is thus the topography: “Und Ulrich bemerkte nun, daß ihm dieses primitiv Epische abhanden gekommen sei, woran das private Leben noch festhält, obgleich öffentlich alles schon unerzählerisch geworden ist und nicht einem ‘Faden’ mehr folgt, sondern sich in einer unendlich verwobenen Fläche ausbreitet” (MoE 650).129 In his study dedicated to the topic, Honold argues that the cohesive agent is both the unified spatial framework and the act of narrating, which give rise to multiple narrative threads. Both are equally related to perspectivistic reduction and a central perspective. Although these are crucial steps in the development of Musil’s argument, I will argue that there is a possibility to overcome the narrative constraints if one resorts to the Gleichnis. This alternative does not posit a central

|| 127 See Frede, “Die Einheit der Handlung”, 105–06.; Michael Erle, “Psychagogie und Erkenntnis (Kap. 10–12)”, 124; Roman Dilcher, “Über die Charaktere und die dichterische Begabung (Kap.15–18)”, 160, 162. All papers are in Aristoteles. Poetik, ed. Otfried Höffe (Berlin: Akademie, 2009). 128 Honold, Die Stadt und der Krieg, 51, 71. 129 Probably as a gloss to this passage, Honold formulates his main thesis thusly: “Die Topographie der Stadt bietet die Möglichkeit, selbst den Verlust an narrativer Stringenz, das SichVerlaufen einer Lebensgeschichte, abzubilden und im Zusammenhang mit einer Vielzahl von Handlungsfäden zu zeigen.” Honold, Die Stadt und der Krieg, 311.

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perspective in narrative terms,130 but it is based on the distinction between perspectivistic reduction and central perspective. Honold’s conception refers to a unified spatial framework that equates the central perspective with perspectivistic reduction, not only through reference to P. F. Strawson’s Individuals,131 but principally because he posits as his theoretical basis the Kantian “I” which accompanies all representations of the world. Similarly, Kant’s concept of apperzeption provides the apriori analytical foundation for the perception of the world and grounds an Anschauung on common sense. For this kind of intuition, it is possible to conceive a straight line and accordingly confer unity to the experienced.132 In Honold’s interpretation, even Moosbrugger recreates his life by binding places and turning them into stages of

|| 130 The attempt to put space and narration on the same level leads to an impasse, according to Honold: “Weniger deutlich ist diese ‘Verkürzung des Verstandes’ hingegen im Falle des erzählerischen Äquivalents der Zentralperspektive, auf das er seine Betrachtung nun ausdehnt”. Honold, Die Stadt und der Krieg, 301. 131 Honold, Die Stadt und der Krieg, 64. Strawson reflects upon individuals and particulars from a Kantian vein (62), and on the basis of the Kantian Anschauung Strawson argues that to identify particulars one always presupposes a unified spatio-temporal framework (29), which allows one to individuate (28), to attain a point of reference and relatively identify particulars (30), and to reidentify: “We operate with the scheme of a single, unified spatio-temporal system. The system is unified in this sense. Of things of which it makes sense to inquire about the spatial position, we think it always significant not only to ask how any two such things are spatially related at any one time, the same for each, but also to inquire about the spatial relations of any one thing at any moment of its history to any other thing at any moment of its history, when the moments may be different. Thus we say: A is now in just the place where B was a thousand years ago. We have, then, the idea of a system of elements every one of which can be both spatially and temporally related to every other.” (31) This is not referential, but reidentification within a framework. This concept is central for the use of a unified framework because we cannot always rely on relative identification, relative to me or other elements. Reidentification is continuity: “It is the essence of the matter that we use the same framework on different occasions. We must not only identify some elements in a non-relative way, we must identify them as just the elements they are of a single continuously usable system of elements.” (32) And here comes the issue that opens a free room for speculation and is thematised in Musil’s novel: “Our methods, or criteria, of reidentification must allow for such facts as these: that the field of our observation is limited; that we go to sleep; that we move. That is to say, they must allow for the facts that we cannot at any moment observe the whole of the spatial framework we use, that there is no part of it that we can observe continuously, and that we ourselves do not occupy a fixed position within it.” (32) Peter F. Strawson, Individuals. An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics (London/New York: Routledge, 2003). 132 Honold, Die Stadt und der Krieg, 293, 294.

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his coming to be.133 Although this relation is relevant to the exploration of the character’s pathology, one could object that Moosbrugger does not have a stable relation to space at all times, so he could never bind his experiences to a path.134 There are moments for him in which there is no difference between object and subject. Moosbrugger’s manner of perceiving the world fluctuates and allows the inconsistencies between ideas and reality to surface. The deviations and empty spaces neglected by the reductionist mind imply that the central perspective is a phantasy or, more precisely, an abstraction or symbolic form. In this respect, Honold quotes Erwin Panofsky, as well as Volkmar Altman’s study Totalität und Perspektive to support the idea that there is no privileged perspective, but rather a metropolis that represents the poly-perspectival lack of order and undermines the mono-perspectivistic approach.135 While multi-perspectivism is not in question here, there is an inconsistency in Honold’s argument revolving around Panofsky’s paper. Panofsky not only offers an historical survey of how the central perspective was constructed in the Renaissance, but implicitly contests the Kantian Anschauung by revealing, for instance, that straight lines appear curved to the eye, whereas lines that are actually curved are seen as straight, as the eye overcompensates for its spherical anatomy.136 This fact grounds speculations about the minimal variations in individual perception and the cultural components of spatial notions. In this context, this means that Ulrich is probably not referring to the Kantian constraints on perspective in this passage, but, in a humanist vein, narrowing down the scope and focusing on a concrete, though fictional, individual.137

|| 133 “Paradoxerweise demonstriert gerade der im objektiven Sinne unzurechnungsfähige Moosbrugger, daß die je eigene Lebensgeschichte dem Prinzip einer subjektiven Zurechnung folgt, das bruchstückhafte Details zur kohärenten Biographie verbindet und die erinnerten Orte als Stationen eines Werdegangs erscheinen läßt.” Honold, Die Stadt und der Krieg, 292. 134 “Aus der Gestaltlosigkeit der gelebten Zeit wird für den Zurechnungsfähigen die lineare Ordnung der eigenen Lebensgeschichte. Moosbrugger müßte also, um die Etappen seines Lebens aus dem ‘gegebenen Mannigfaltigen’ einer ‘verworrenen’ Zeit herauslösen und als zusammenhängende Linie, als den ‘Weg’ seines Lebens wahrnehmen zu können, diese Linie selbst ziehen, und er müßte dazu wiederum zuerst die ungeordnete Menge disparater Eindrücke in eine zeitliche Folge bringen ”. Honold, Die Stadt und der Krieg, 294. 135 Honold, Die Stadt und der Krieg, 301. 136 Erwin Panofsky, “Die Perspektive als ‘symbolische Form’” in Aufsätze zu Grundfragen der Kunstwissenschaft, Erwin Panofsky, ed. Hariolf Oberer, Egon Verheyen (Berlin: Spiess, 1992), 103. 137 Panofsky talks here about the inexhaustible experience of the world that was proposed by Bruno and then stabilized by idealist philosophies: “Kein Wunder, wenn ein Mann wie Giorda-

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Musil might have failed to project Kakania as an edifice contesting the linearity of narratives in all respects due to the stable chronology,138 but the characters’ ponderings take the reader to distant times and places and, in this manner, defy the straight line.139 The perspective reduction refers partly to the automatized process of filling blank spaces. Due to a habit, or a completist drive, one relies on a thought pattern when giving a narrative account or reading.140 But the link between perspectivistic reduction and the central perspective does not seek to stabilize an identity through narration, but to reveal the mirage that any perspective is, or at best, how even the simplest of ideas, the straight line, if realized and seen as such, can in fact never be a straight line at all.141 || no Bruno diese gewissermaßen der göttlichen Allmacht entwachsene Welt des RäumlichUnendlichen und dabei durch und durch Metrischen nun ihrerseits mit einer fast religiösen Erhabenheit ausstattet und ihr ‘neben der unendlichen Ausdehnung des demokritischen κενόν die unendliche Dynamik der neuplatonischen Weltseele leiht; allein in ihrer noch mystischen Färbung ist diese Raumanschauung doch schon dieselbe, die späterhin durch den Cartesianismus rationalisiert und durch die Kantische Lehre formalisiert werden sollte.” Panofsky, “Die Perspektive als ‘symbolische Form’”, 122–123. 138 Honold, Die Stadt und der Krieg, 314. 139 There are inconsistencies in some of Honold’s arguments. To posit the unified framework as a narrative cohesive force flirts with the monolithic instead of the digressive that, with its faults and bad taste, makes room for multi-perspectivism. Digressive perspectives require the suspension of a coordinated system as well as walking aimlessly, one could say as a flâneur: “An ihren Abschweifungen sind sie zu erkennen, die Historie und ihr Historiker. Wird Geschichte räumlich vorgestellt, nach dem Modell eines zurückgelegten Weges, dessen Spur sich retrospektiv abzeichnet, so sind ihre Aberrationen, die Abweichungen von der geraden Bahn zielgerichteter Entwicklungsprozesse, als Metaphern historischer Kontingenz lesbar.” Honold, Die Stadt und der Krieg, 319. 140 In the twelfth note, Panofsky writes: “Unser Bewußtsein rechne so sehr mit dem Gegensatz zwischen perspektivischer Erscheinung und objektiver Wirklichkeit, daß es gewissermaßen eine Überkompensation der perspektivischen Veränderungen vollziehe, d. h., gewöhnt, das objektiv Falsche als richtig anzusehen, in vielen Fällen das objektiv Richtige als falsch empfinde: genau zylindrische Säulen, die sich, physiologisch betrachtet, nach oben zu verschmälern scheinen, würden, psychologisch betrachtet, gleichwohl als nach oben sich verbreiternd empfunden, weil eben die perspektivische Konvergenz gewohnheitsmäßig eine so starke Überkompensation erfahre, daß nur eine noch stärkere Konvergenz, d. h. eine objektiv etwas konische Bildung, den Eindruck einer wirklich rein zylindrischen Form erzeuge; und so würde also auch die scheinbare Konvexität der geraden Linien so stark überkompensiert, daß wir die wirklichen Geraden als konkav empfinden und demgemäß, anscheinend paradoxerweise, den Eindruck wirklicher Geradlinigkeit nur bei tatsächlich konvexer Linienführung empfangen würden.“ Panofsky, “Die Perspektive als ‘symbolische Form’”, 133. 141 A similar take on space grounded in fantasy is in Marie-Louise Roth, Robert Musil. Ethik und Ästhetik (München: List, 1972), 191; and see also Birgit Nübel, Robert Musil. Essayismus als Selbstreflexion der Moderne (Berlin/New York: De Gruyter, 2006), 74.

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This suspicion makes it impossible for Ulrich to advocate for any solution without caveats. Ulrich is driven by skepticism and, after mentioning perspectivistic reduction, he even confesses that he lacks the capacity to commit to a point of view: “[U]nd so, wie sich allenthalben die sichtbaren Verhältnisse für das Auge verschieben […] und endlich das Ganze eine ordentliche glatte Rundung erfährt, tun es eben auch die unsichtbaren Verhältnisse und werden von Verstand und Gefühl derart verschoben, daß unbewußt etwas entsteht, worin man sich Herr im Hause fühlt. Diese Leistung ist es also,” sagte sich Ulrich “die ich nicht in wünschenswerter Weise vollbringe.” (MoE 649)

Our protagonist’s passivity stands in the way when he tries to stabilize and endow his personal identity with continuity. He fails in this task due to his analytical penchant. For this reason, one could say that the divergence between a central perspective and a reduced one – even if ultimately all perspectives reveal themselves to be reductions, or, more accurately, abstractions – is a divergence that allows us to speak about different manners of relating to narratives. Now, if it is not space, the only element that can act as a cohesive force is narrating. This is a claim that not even Ulrich questions, but stretches to anthropological dimensions: Die meisten Menschen sind im Grundverhältnis zu sich selbst Erzähler. Sie lieben nicht die Lyrik, oder nur für Augenblicke, und wenn in den Faden des Lebens auch ein wenig “weil” und “damit” hineingeknüpft wird, so verabscheuen sie doch alle Besinnung, die darüber hinausgreift: sie lieben das ordentliche Nacheinander von Tatsachen, weil es einer Notwendigkeit gleichsieht, und fühlen sich durch den Eindruck, daß ihr Leben einen “Lauf” habe, irgendwie im Chaos geborgen. (MoE 650)

Narrating is the basal rapport to the Self, but this does not imply that the need to exorcise chaos must solely be met and overcome with necessity and causality as guiding concepts. This type of narration is analogous to a central perspective and is grounded in a rationale common to all that produces, figuratively speaking, a linear account threaded by the actions of an autonomous agent. This type of narration can presume that it presents life’s inexorable laws: Und als einer jener scheinbar abseitigen und abstrakten Gedanken, die in seinem Leben oft so unmittelbare Bedeutung gewannen, fiel ihm ein, daß das Gesetz dieses Lebens, nach dem man sich, überlastet und von Einfalt träumend, sehnt, kein anderes sei als das der erzählerischen Ordnung! Jener einfachen Ordnung, die darin besteht, daß man sagen kann: “Als das geschehen war, hat sich jenes ereignet!” Es ist die einfache Reihenfolge, die Abbildung der überwältigenden Mannigfaltigkeit des Lebens in einer eindimensiona-

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len, wie ein Mathematiker sagen würde, was uns beruhigt; die Aufreihung alles dessen, was in Raum und Zeit geschehen ist, auf einen Faden, eben jenen berühmten “Faden der Erzählung”, aus dem nun also auch der Lebensfaden besteht. Wohl dem, der sagen kann “als”, “ehe” und “nachdem”! Es mag ihm Schlechtes widerfahren sein, oder er mag sich in Schmerzen gewunden haben: sobald er imstande ist, die Ereignisse in der Reihenfolge ihres zeitlichen Ablaufes wiederzugeben, wird ihm so wohl, als schiene ihm die Sonne auf den Magen. (MoE 650)

Although Ulrich makes a breakthrough, inconsistencies have been accumulating from the moment his reflections started. To think about laws in relation to life and the ethical task of giving an account of oneself leads to deontological ethics. But throughout the novel, regularity together with its imprecisions is preferred over law-like forms. For this reason, laws are superseded by the arbitrary order instated by narrating. Narrating is a universal that works like the Kantian consciousness and gives unity to the representations of the world’s manifoldness by being always present.142 This process is legitimated by critical thinking and consequently makes it possible to raise claims on being able to lead a life.143 But as we know, Ulrich does not believe in a predetermined plan anymore and his objections to ascribing ideas or actions undermine the solution to irrationality through this type of narration.144 The crucial question underlying this problem has already been concisely formulated by Honold: “Die Krise des Erzählens wird als ein Genreproblem entwickelt; die Frage lautet dann nicht mehr: Lineare Erzählung oder Polyperspektivismus?, sondern: Welche Vorentscheidungen sind durch ein bestimmtes Erzählmodell getroffen, welche historischen und situativen Ausgangsbedingungen bestimmen das jeweilige a priori des Erzählens?”145 The initial conditions implied by a narrative form are the ethical-aesthetic ones that define Ulrich’s quest for autonomy and how an historical field is assembled even before events are selected and concatenated in a narration. For this reason, there is a

|| 142 Honold compares narration to the Kantian “I” that accompanies every representation. Honold, Die Stadt und der Krieg, 293, 301. 143 “Statt einem vorhandenen Plan zu folgen, weiß er als ‘nach-kritisches’ Erkenntnissubjekt, dass nur jener Weg als planvoll und folgerichtig erscheint, dessen Linie er selbst gezeichnet hat; der Ariadnefaden der Erzählung muß zuerst verlegt werden, soll man sich an ihm orientieren können.” Honold, Die Stadt und der Krieg, 308. 144 Honold mentions this solution: “Die personale Identität liegt nicht in einer konstanten Größe, sondern in der Zurechnung von Eigenschaften und Handlungen an verschiedenen Zeitpunkten zu einem konstanten Ich”. Honold, Die Stadt und der Krieg, 299. 145 Honold, Die Stadt und der Krieg, 303.

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detail in Honold’s appraisal that reveals the possibility to wander through forms, namely, the “jeweilige apriori”. To speak about an individual apriori, in a context where the central perspective is the main issue, undermines the unified spatio-temporal framework. The combination of “respective” and “apriori” distorts the generalizing capacities of the apriori intuition, whose forms are stable and independent of any content. Hence, any minimal change in intuition’s machinery and in the narrative mechanism that depicts a world would have as a consequence a new geometry where straight lines would be strictly straight within that specific world. If one could manipulate the apriori apparatus through traditional literary devices, then the question about autonomy would not revolve around being certain that I decided something and turned it into an action, but around being certain that the fictional world I strive to narrate is the best world. In short, this passage undermines the fact that a narration can establish necessity in a context that is not only looking to underscore the arbitrariness on which narrative necessity is built, but also asks on which concepts this necessity ought to be built. 2.4.3.3 Becoming oneself without becoming a total abstraction In the past, building necessity didn’t pose a problem, since the cohesive force was carved in the world’s dyadic form. In the present, it is still possible for the divine to surge through everyday life, but only in rural areas: “[…] Ein alter Mann verliert seinen letzten Zahn: und dieses kleine Ereignis bedeutet einen Einschnitt im Leben aller seiner Nachbarn, woran sie ihre Erinnerungen knüpfen können! Und so singen die Vögel alle Abende um das Dorf und immer in der gleichen Weise, wenn hinter der sinkenden Sonne die Stille kommt, aber es ist jedesmal ein neues Ereignis, als wäre die Welt noch keine sieben Tage alt! Am Land kommen die Götter noch zu den Menschen,” dachte er “man ist jemand und erlebt etwas, aber in der Stadt, wo es tausendmal so viel Erlebnisse gibt, ist man nicht mehr imstande, sie in Beziehung zu sich zu bringen: und so beginnt ja wohl das berüchtigte Abstraktwerden des Lebens.” (MoE 649)

Perhaps out of nostalgia, Ulrich thinks that, far from the city, chronology is instantly constituted. The dwellers of a small town can relate to a foreseeable and common event in a neighbour’s biological decline. They have a constant experience of nature and can distinguish differences. However, the countless events taking place simultaneously in a city make it impossible to ground a common experience in the everyday, and thus life begins to become abstract. There are two ways to approach the ability to abstract. To elaborate on them, Panofsky’s central perspective will allow us to move between the abstract that leads to totality and the abstract as related to generalizations grounded in

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an individual’s concrete features. While the former falls within the discussion revolving around the anderen Zustand, the latter belongs to Sören Kierkegaard’s discussion in Either/Or. Kierkegaard’s reflections will put the central role of the anderem Zustand into perspective and show how there is a parallel discussion, reminiscent of Tristram Shandy’s humanism, for which abstraction is folly. Furthermore, Kierkegaard’s philosophy reveals a middle point between the postromantic Ulrich and the pre-romantic Tristram.146 The central perspective provides a unified framework and, in this allegory, also a moral compass to orientate oneself without a stable guiding principle. However, Panofsky not only defines the central perspective, but also argues that abstractions are intimately related to how a representation is constructed: Diese ganze “Zentralperspektive” macht, um die Gestaltung eines völlig rationalen, d. h. unendlichen, stetigen und homogenen Raumes gewährleisten zu können, stillschweigend zwei sehr wesentliche Voraussetzungen: zum Einen, daß wir mit einem einzigen und unbewegten Auge sehen würden, zum Andern, daß der ebene Durchschnitt durch die Sehpyramide als adäquate Wiedergabe unseres Sehbildes gelten dürfe. In Wahrheit bedeuten aber diese beiden Voraussetzungen eine überaus kühne Abstraktion von der Wirklichkeit (wenn wir in diesem Falle als “Wirklichkeit” den tatsächlichen, subjektiven Seheindruck bezeichnen dürfen).147

The conditions or principles involved in the composition of an image – even if legitimized by reason and common sense – result from an abstraction that hides, at least hypothetically, the wirkliche Wirklichkeit which Ulrich is looking for. To catch a glimpse of it one must, according to the previously analyzed fragments, get a perpetual motion machine going; one needs to start wandering and looking at the scenery from different perspectives. Only in movement can somebody discover perception’s peculiarities and the compensation performed by our minds. The two work together to bring up the central perspective or, in other cases, a tendency of perceiving and construing that is likewise based on an abstraction. Perhaps one could even claim that the novel’s core conception is that only through motion can one prove that it is an immanent dynamic that defines reality, only motion articulated through the power of fantasy can show how reality is actually, materially, effectively constructed. Fantasy, construed as the soul’s envelope and as the ability through which mind and body com|| 146 For this short discussion revolving around Kierkegaard I am indebted to the course taught by Leonardo Lisi at Johns Hopkins University. I had the opportunity to attend this course as part of a mobility program of the network “Principles of Cultural Dynamics” at Freie Universität Berlin. 147 Panofsky, “Die Perspektive als ‘symbolische Form’”, 101.

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municate to posit a phantasmatic case lacking reference but displayed before the reader’s eyes, enables this movement. This concept, reminiscent of a long tradition that leads back to Dante, the Stoics, and Aristotle,148 is a crucial concern in Modernist literature and its exploration of diverse modes of experience and signification. For instance, Claudia Olk in her study of Virginia Woolf coined the term “aesthetic vision” to refer to “a dynamic function of the text [that] mediates between immediate experience and abstraction, between transparency and opacity, between presence and absence, and between subject and object.”149 Imagination is inherently dynamic. Only movement can reveal how “[vision] presents experience, reflects on it, and potentially transforms it. It models the relation between the perceiving subject and the object perceived and attains an intermediate aesthetic status.”150 Contrary to the focus on motion here established, Volkmar Altman assumes that there is a progressive development within the novel and argues that, by depicting diverse perspectives, the novel aims to establish the actual experience of the anderen Zustand as a central perspective.151 In this respect, one should take into account that, if intuition changes in the andere Zustand, then one cannot talk exactly about a central perspective and consequently of a unified spatio-temporal framework since these concepts depart from Kantian intuition. This means that the central perspective and totality are not compatible within the framework of the anderer Zustand.152 The inconsistency in Altmann’s ap|| 148 Robert Klein, “Spirito Peregrino” in La forme et l’intelligible, ed. André Chastel (Paris: Gallimard, 1970) 31–64. Eden, Poetic and Legal Fiction, 81–85. 149 Claudia Olk, Virginia Woolf and the Aesthetics of Vision (Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2014), 15. For signification, see 14. 150 Olk, Virginia Woolf and the Aesthetics of Vision, 20. 151 “[Die mystische Einheitserfahrung] bildet für [Musil] vielmehr die Einheit hinter den Gegensätzen – und in diesem Sinne eine zentrale Perspektive, in der sich aus seiner Sicht, in welcher zeitlichen Dimension auch immer, ‘wirkliche’ Wirklichkeit offenbart. Und es ist paradoxerweise gerade die multiperspektivische Darstellungsweise Musils, die diesen Wirklichkeitsbegriff in ihren Strukturen zum Ausdruck bringt, indem sie die an sich perspektivische Erfahrung des ‘anderen Zustands’ aufwertet, sie mit dem Siegel der Wahrhaftigkeit versieht.” Altmann, Totalität und Perspektive, 24. 152 Despite the fact that both totality and central perspective flirt with the general as a category that allows one to construct a unified spatio-temporal framework to orientate oneself, the general, all embracing, self-reflexive concept attained in the mystical experience would be beyond any perspective. Altman’s claim that the andrer Zustand represents an ontological central perspective results from the identification of the mystical experience with the general. Here, he dismisses Böhme (19) and Learmann (18) with their anomic manifoldness. “Ob Moosbrugger, Lindner, Hans Sepp oder Meingast, ob Graf Leinsdorf, General Stumm v. Bordwehr oder Feuermal – sie alle zeigen sich in ihrem Denken ebenso wie ihren Handlungsweisen

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proach resides in the idea that only the “original”, “general”, “omnipresent” dimension conveyed by the mystical experience is the goal that can be derived from the complex narrative structure that depicts the idiosyncratic view of different characters, and this goal is unmediated truth.153 But what would happen if one refrained from reaching out to immediate truth and endeavored to mediate a link between the abstract and concrete facets of life? According to Kierkegaard, choosing oneself is what paves the way towards the abstract as a general concept grounded in the concrete and in the constant concretizations that a personality undergoes and undertakes: Indem du nun Dich selbst absolut wählst, entdeckst Du leicht, daß dieses Selbst keine Abstraktion oder Tautologie ist; so mag es allenfalls im Augenblick der Orientierung erscheinen, in dem man sondert, bis man den abstraktesten Ausdruck für dieses Selbst findet, und selbst dann ist es eine Illusion, daß es völlig abstrakt und inhaltlos sei, denn es ist ja doch nicht das Bewußtsein der Freiheit im allgemeinen, dies ist eine Bestimmung des Gedankens; sondern es ist entstanden durch eine Wahl und ist das Bewußtsein von diesem bestimmten freien Wesen, das es selbst ist und kein anderer. Dieses Selbst enthält in sich eine reiche Konkretion, eine Vielfalt von Bestimmtheiten, von Eigenschaften, kurz, ist das ganze ästhetische Selbst, das ethisch gewählt ist.154

|| abhängig von einem Wirklichkeitsverständnis, das den ‘anderen Zustand’ als seine Zentralperspektive ausweist. Der ‘andere Zustand’ ist bei ihnen allen der – zumeist gar nicht ausdrücklich reflektierte – Maßstab, an dem die verschiedenen Bewußtseins- und Erfahrungszustände auf ihren Wirklichkeits- und Wahrheitsgehalt hin beurteilt werden; und selbst in der falschen Orientierung, der diese Figuren allesamt erliegen, manifestiert sich, reflektiert auf der Ebene des Erzählens, oft nicht ein immanent richtiges Moment, das auf den ‘anderen Zustand’ indirekt hindeutet.” Altmann, Totalität und Perspektive, 44. 153 Altmann, Totalität und Perspektive, 53–64. “Ohne hier nochmals auf die Einzelheiten eingehen zu wollen, dürfte ohne weiteres zu erkennen sein, daß diese erzählerische Konzeption zugleich den Gedanken der Omnipräsenz des ‘anderen Zustands’ vermittelt und befördert. Insofern alle im MoE vorgestellten Romanfiguren ihr Denken, Fühlen und Handeln, wenn auch auf sehr unterschiedliche Weise, an einem ‘unmögliche[n] Zustand’ (2, 659) orientieren, dessen Licht durch die ‘Risse’ der Normalität bricht, verweisen sie indirekt auf die zuständliche Erlebnisform als jenem Prinzip, das sie untergründig allesamt miteinander verbindet. Indem sich selbst noch in der perspektivisch verkürzten und damit ‘falschen’ Weltsicht, die den Repräsentanten der ‘normalen’ Wirklichkeit anhaftet, reflexhaft ein Moment des ‘rechten Lebens’ (3, 825) zeigt, erscheint der ‘andere Zustand’ gleichsam gegenbildlich als eine Sphäre der Wirklichkeit, die den gemeinsamen und allgegenwärtigen Bezugsgrund all jener Perspektivismen bildet, die das ‘Seinesgleichen geschieht’ prägen.” (57) 154 Sören Kierkegaard, Entweder – Oder, ed. Hermann Diem and Walter Rest, trans. Heinrich Fauteck (München: DTV, 2005), 782.

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The choice cannot be a tautology since we are not dealing with an essentially predetermined Self, but rather with a self enmeshed in the incessant process of becoming oneself, that is, a self that does not choose oneself by resorting to already chosen criteria or attributes. Furthermore, the choice is absolute because it is independent of any contents, or rather it is a commitment to the concretions and the ethos of this Self as well as a decision regarding the difference between good and evil.155 In a somewhat contrasting manner, the abstraction in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften has been characterized as an abstractum beyond the self and as a general handle with which one can manipulate the world independently of any concretion.156 This type of abstract represents an absolute negative and the path to completeness or perfection.157 Now, Kierkegaard’s philosophy befits the problematic raised by the Abstraktwerden des Lebens because it strives towards immediacy and totality, like the mystical experience, and also because this philosophy touches upon the dissolution of any determination, which, in Musil’s novel, makes abstract art a programmatic element aiming at unhinging the inner dimension from individual traits.158 Indeterminacy might be the previous step that makes it possible to raise any claim on reality, but its relation to the work of art might lead towards an abstract form that creates its own possibilities, that is, an immanent absolute that functions like perspectivistic reduction and has the potential to make a world intelligible. For this reason, to remain within immediacy and indeterminateness is a position that neglects some as-

|| 155 “Man mag der Philosophie meines Erachtens immerhin darin recht geben, daß sie einen absoluten Widerspruch nicht denken kann, doch folgt daraus keineswegs, daß es diesen nicht gibt. Indem ich denke, verunendliche ich auch mich selbst, jedoch nicht absolut, denn ich verschwinde im Absoluten; erst indem ich mich selbst absolut wähle, verundendliche ich mich selbst absolut, denn ich bin selbst das Absolute, denn nur mich selbst kann ich absolut wählen, und diese absolute Wahl meiner selbst ist meine Freiheit, und nur indem ich mich selbst absolut gewählt habe, habe ich eine absolute Differenz gesetzt, die nämlich zwischen Gut und Böse.” Kierkegaard, Entweder – Oder, 783. 156 “In keinem Augenblick darf aus der durch Wirklichkeitszerfall entstandenen Möglichkeitsfülle eine bestimmte neue Realität entspringen. Damit ist das Stadium eines nur idealen Alles und Nichts erreicht, das keine Konkretion duldet: das Stadium einer radikal abstrakten und ‘absoluten’ Kunst. Nur die vollkommene Abstraktheit garantiert die geforderte unendliche Offenheit.” Jochen Schmidt, Ohne Eigenschaften (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1975), 71. 157 “Zusammenfassend lassen sich Eigenschaftslosigkeit und Abstraktion nur als vorläufige Ziele bestimmen: als notwendige Medien allerdings zu der Vollkommenheit, die jenseits der Worte und des Wollens liegt.” Schmidt, Ohne Eigenschaften, 78. 158 Schmidt, Ohne Eigenschaften, 70.

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pects of the pervasive ironic mode that opens the discussion about the congruence between actions and decisions, and leads to perspectivistic reduction. The abstract in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften can be thus understood in two different ways. On the one side, there is a continuum whose opposites are Moosbrugger, the absolute positive, and Ulrich, the absolute negative. On the other side, there is a further alternative that revolves around moral character as immanent principle of intelligibility.159 Moosbrugger dwells in a state close to the first moment of the choice, which is choosing oneself as an ideal, thereby severing ties with the world and becoming isolated.160 Due to his chthonic nature, he resembles the ancient greeks who could transform their life into a virtuous example. Moosbrugger dodges the question of irrationality by engendering a world, and even if he decides to use his poietic powers to instate an ideal, this is still something reserved for the epic and lingers in the abstract. For the modern condition described by Kierkegaard, a choice guided by an ideal is, despite its perfection and completeness, extraneous because the perfect ideal is an abstraction that disregards the concrete and finite knowledge. Thus, Moosbrugger’s exemplary life is not a viable option to emulate: Das Unvollkommene an dieser Lebensanschauung ist leicht ersichtlich. Der Fehler lag darin, daß das Individuum sich selbst völlig abstrakt gewählt hatte, und deshalb blieb auch die Vollkommenheit, die es begehrte, und erreichte, ebenso abstrakt. Aus diesem Grunde eben habe ich als identisch mit dem sich selbst Wählen das sich selbst Bereuen hervorgehoben; denn die Reue setzt das Individuum in die innigste Beziehung und den engsten Zusammenhang mit einer Umwelt.161

An infinite reason would lead to completion and a perfect realization, but since such a goal is unattainable, finite reason will have to settle for certainty. One can always be certain that any choice was a poor decision and will regret it. || 159 This possibility is latent in Schmidt’s interpretation: “Die platonische Idee als ein ins Unendliche hinausgerückter perspektivischer Endpunkt der Objektsphäre hat ihr Äquivalent in der Subjektsphäre: das Genie, den ebenso ungreifbar weit zurückverlegten Fluchtpunkt der Innerlichkeit. Mit gutem Grund nimmt deshalb die Erörterung des Genieproblems einen wichtigen Platz im Mann ohne Eigenschaften ein. Genialität ist nichts anderes als eine ins Subjektive transponierte Idealität. Ihr negatives Vorstadium ist die Eigenschaftslosigkeit – so wie das Pendant im negativen Vorfeld der objektiven Idealität die Abstraktion ist. Nirgends gelangt Musil über die Negation hinaus. Ulrichs Reflexionen machen die Faszination des nur aus mystischer Erfahrung visierbaren Zieles und zugleich die Aporie deutlich.” Schmidt, Ohne Eigenschaften, 78. 160 Kierkegaard, Entweder – Oder, 803. 161 Kierkegaard, Entweder – Oder, 804.

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When one places the ideal overlay on top of the factual map, epistemological inconsistencies ensue that cannot be conciliated but only palliated with repentance. Besides the epic and repentance, Kierkegaard brings into consideration the mystics who chose god and acknowledged him as the absolute “You”. By devoting themselves to god and loving him, the mystics start an inner action. However, this type of action is incompatible with Tristram’s search for secular certainty through narrative means. The mystics achieve the immediacy reserved in Tristram Shandy for immediate sentimental appraisal of goodness. Instead of constructing and reconstructing a world with an individual at its center, as Tristram does, the love of the mystic makes him or her cut off any ties with the world. Worship and prayer cannot lead to the principle an ethicist and historiographer could use, instead the mystic is defined by an erotic and sensuous love which does not need content, nor another person, but an isolation that denies reality.162 To neglect reality is, for Kierkegard’s ethicist, tantamount to disregarding god’s creation. But much more important for the ethical quest of the selflegitimized and self-grounded individual is that the dissolution a mystic experiences in his or her love for god thwarts any attempt to become concrete.163 Without a careful observation of reality and its constraints it is impossible to become concrete; rather, one becomes an image of life that, as Ulrich deplores, is abstract and has lost the cohesive force provided by everyday life with its palpable gods. However, “abstraction” stands both for the perfect idea instantiated by the epic and for modern folly or, for instance, Walter’s folly, which constructs perfectly coherent systems whose adequacy to the world progressively diminishes.164 With a more optimistic frame of mind, one could claim that Tristram

|| 162 “Die Entwicklung eines Mystikers ist derart metaphysisch und ästhetisch bestimmt, daß man sie nicht Geschichte nennen darf, es sei denn in dem Sinne, wie man von der Geschichte einer Pflanze spricht. Für den Mystiker ist die ganze Welt tot, er hat sich in Gott verliebt. Die Entwicklung seines Lebens nun ist die Entfaltung dieser Liebe.” Kierkegaard, Entweder – Oder, 806. For the diverse ideas advanced in this paragraph, see 804–807. 163 “Der Fehler des Mystikers ist also nicht, daß er sich selbst wählt, denn daran tut er meiner Ansicht nach gut, sondern sein Fehler ist, daß er sich nicht richtig wählt, er wählt nach seiner Freiheit, und doch wählt er nicht ethisch; man kann aber nach seiner Freiheit sich selbst nur wählen, wenn man sich ethisch wählt; ethisch aber kann man sich selbst nur wählen, indem man sich selbst bereut, und nur indem man sich selbst bereut, wird man konkret, und nur als konkretes Individuum ist man ein freies Individuum.” Kierkegaard, Entweder – Oder, 812. 164 “Der Fehler des Mystikers ist, daß er in der Wahl nicht konkret wird für sich selbst und auch nicht für Gott; er wählt sich selbst abstrakt und ermangelt daher die Durchsichtigkeit.

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makes some progress and, despite his imaginative character, he strives critically for certainty. He exploits the trait in which human dignity resides: Darin liegt nämlich die ewige Würde des Menschen, daß er eine Geschichte bekommen kann, darin liegt das Göttliche an ihm, daß er selbst, wenn er will, dieser Geschichte Kontinuität verleihen kann; denn die bekommt sie erst, wenn sie nicht den Inbegriff dessen darstellt, was mir geschehen oder widerfahren ist, sondern meine eigene Tat, dergestalt, daß selbst das mir Widerfahrene durch mich verwandelt und von Notwendigkeit in Freiheit überführt ist.165

Grounding continuity is not only a matter of agency but of discovering the self and embracing necessity to turn it poetically into freedom. In view of this, one could ask: in the first book, does Ulrich represent a reflective Self who has chosen himself and has actively began to become who he is? Ulrich comes up with a decision, to embrace active passivism. He has achieved, hence, the highest aesthetic vision of the world: despair.166 It is the despair distilled from doubt that goes beyond the first impression of the sensuous and reaches the underlying potency that unveils the world, a despair that comes after one realizes that any decision is imperfect and transitory.167 And yet, the world’s fleeting nature is not so daunting as to lead into utter despaired stagnation. From constraints and instability, it is possible to derive the legitimacy of an individual and even choose despair, that is, choose to remain in an aesthetic mode. In this manner, one can reclaim a temporality not only bounded to history but, at the same time, reaching an eternal validity.168 Ulrich makes a similar choice and the result is his Urlaub vom Leben. By turning his decision into a lifestyle, Ulrich has overcome to a certain degree the chasm between actuality and ideas. He has internalized his thoughts and transformed them into a part of his personality and way of relating to the world.169

|| Wenn man nämlich glaubt, das Abstrakte sei das Durchsichtige, so irrt man sich; das Abstrakte ist das Unklare, das Nebelhafte.” Kierkegaard, Entweder – Oder, 812. 165 Kierkegaard, Entweder – Oder, 815. 166 Kierkegaard, Entweder – Oder, 748. 167 Kierkegaard, Entweder – Oder, 746. 168 “So wähle denn die Verzweiflung, denn die Verzweiflung ist selbst eine Wahl, denn zweifeln kann man, ohne es zu wählen, verzweifeln aber kann man nicht, ohne es zu wählen. Und indem man verzweifelt, wählt man wieder, und was wählt man da, man wählt sich selbst, nicht in seiner Unmittelbarkeit, nicht als dieses zufällige Individuum, sondern man wählt sich selbst in seiner ewigen Gültigkeit.” Kierkegaard, Entweder – Oder, 768. 169 “Zweifel ist die Verzweiflung des Gedankens, Verzweiflung ist der Zweifel der Persönlichkeit, eben darum halte ich auch so sehr an der Bestimmung des Wählens fest, die meine Lo-

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His reflections begin to become concrete, albeit without content, and regain the territories lost to a systematization based only on an objective abstract thinking.170 With his choice, he denies that only abstract thought can catch a glimpse of completeness. The only path to it is via the absolute, but not via an absolute outside of me. The absolute is a modal concept, and it can only be used to modify, like an adverb, how I choose myself. To acknowledge despair and turn it into a personality trait is to acknowledge that as a created individual I am the only absolute that I can choose, but that, at the same time, this absolute is imperfect. To choose oneself as an absolute is to choose, in a humanist vein, an absolute immanent, created and creating, an absolute that can only acquire its form through a choice that leads to the task of becoming.171 At a certain moment of the novel, Ulrich appears to reach the point of despairing doubt, but his character’s development cannot be said to coincide with the path drawn by Kierkegaard. For the latter, there is a possibility to reconcile the individual with the abstract, namely, through the concept of the general in relation to the singular. Only when the abstract is defined not negatively, but positively by the traits that make an individual concrete, that is, when the general is not interdictory nor guided by the form of the law, but grounded in the circumstances;172 and only when one chooses not to despair, but instead chooses || sung ist, der Nerv meiner Lebensanschauung, und eine solche habe ich, wenn ich mir auch keineswegs anmaße, ein System zu haben.” Kierkegaard, Entweder – Oder, 769. 170 “Zweifel und Verzweiflung gehören also völlig verschiedenen Sphären an, es sind verschiedene Seiten der Seele, die dabei in Bewegung gesetzt werden. Doch hiermit bin ich noch keineswegs zufriedengestellt, denn dann wären Zweifel und Verzweiflung einander nebengeordnet, und das ist nicht der Fall. Verzweiflung ist eben ein Ausdruck für die ganze Persönlichkeit, Zweifel nur für den Gedanken. Die vermeintliche Objektivität, die der Zweifel hat, weswegen er so vornehm ist, ist gerade ein Ausdruck für seine Unvollkommenheit. Zweifel liegt daher in der Differenz, Verzweiflung im Absoluten.” Kierkegaard, Entweder – Oder, 770. 171 “Indem ich also absolut wähle, wähle ich die Verzweiflung, und in der Verzweiflung wähle ich das Absolute, denn ich bin selbst das Absolute, ich setze das Absolute und ich bin selbst das Absolute […]. Was ich wähle, das setze ich nicht, denn wäre es nicht gesetzt, so könnte ich es nicht wählen, und doch, wenn ich es nicht setzte dadurch, daß ich es wähle, so wählte ich es nicht. Es ist, denn wenn es nicht wäre, könnte ich es nicht wählen; es ist nicht, denn es wird erst dadurch, daß ich es wähle, und sonst wäre meine Wahl eine Illusion.” Kierkegaard, Entweder – Oder, 771. The tertium non datur is overcome by the self and its relation to the absolute. 172 “Das Ethische ist das Allgemeine und somit das Abstrakte. In seiner vollkommenen Abstraktion ist daher das Ethische immer verbietend. Dergestalt zeigt das Ethische sich als Gesetz.” Kierkegaard, Entweder – Oder, 821. “Erst wenn das Individuum selbst das Allgemeine ist, erst dann läßt das Ethische sich realisieren. Es ist das Geheimnis, das im Gewissen liegt, es ist das

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oneself, only in that moment can one attempt to turn one’s own singularity into the ideal general image of oneself.173 Ulrich did not choose himself, but he acknowledges Moosbrugger as an order in himself. Moosbrugger shapes his world experiences in a unique way, but the breakthrough for Ulrich is that this unique experience is revealed only through narrative accounts, whose structure and sources vary and allow him to understand Moosbrugger and even compare himself to such a murderer: Sein Zwiespalt war ein anderer und gerade der, daß er nichts unterdrückte und dabei sehen mußte, daß ihn aus dem Bild eines Mörders nichts Fremderes anblickte als aus anderen Bildern der Welt, die alle so waren wie seine eigenen alten Bilder: halb gewordener Sinn, halb wieder hervorquellender Unsinn! Ein entsprungenes Gleichnis der Ordnung: das war Moosbrugger für ihn! (MoE 653)

Ulrich comes to this conclusion after accidentally re-enacting the scene that “led” Moosbrugger to murder, “genau so gegangen war wie er heute” (MoE 652). Once again, motion rescued Ulrich from his skeptical nature, but, more importantly, this scene posits the Gleichnis as an abstraction that consolidates in a definite image what was once the world’s manifoldness. Moosbrugger embodies an epistemological parable, which in Musil’s language is tantamount to saying that the murder is a Gleichnis der Gleichnis. The parable’s indeterminacy and all the potential faces it can be shaped into do not disappear with their realization. Their actual image preserves the un-

|| Geheimnis, welches das individuelle Leben mit sich selber hat, daß es zugleich ein individuelles Leben und das Allgemeine ist, wenn nicht unmittelbar als solches, so doch nach seiner Möglichkeit. Wer das Leben ethisch betrachtet, der sieht das Allgemeine, und wer ethisch lebt, der drückt in seinem Leben das Allgemeine aus, er macht sich zu dem allgemeinen Menschen, nicht dadurch, daß er sich seiner Konkretion entkleidet, denn dann würde er zu gar nichts, sondern dadurch, daß er sich damit bekleidet und sie mit dem Allgemeinen durchdringt. Der allgemeine Mensch ist nämlich kein Phantom, sondern jeder Mensch ist der allgemeine Mensch, das heißt, jedem Menschen ist der Weg vorgezeichnet, auf dem er der allgemeine Mensch wird. Wer ästhetisch lebt, ist der zufällige Mensch, er glaubt der vollkommene Mensch dadurch zu sein, daß er der einzige Mensch ist; wer ethisch lebt, arbeitet darauf hin, der allgemeine Mensch zu werden.” (822) 173 “Wenn das Individuum sich selbst erkannt und sich selbst gewählt hat, so ist es im Begriff, sich selbst zu realisieren; da es sich aber frei realisieren soll, muß es wissen, was das ist, was es realisieren soll. Was es realisieren will, ist doch wohl es selbst, aber es ist sein ideales Selbst, das es doch nirgends sonst findet als in sich selbst. Hält man nicht daran fest, daß das Individuum das ideale Selbst in sich selber hat, so wird sein Dichten und Trachten abstrakt.” Kierkegaard, Entweder – Oder, 826.

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realized. While the Moosbrugger complex serves as a vehicle that shows how a state of affairs is subjectively created, he is a narrative construction. His personality and case result from diverse narratives contending with each other and advancing claims about the inaccessible nature of Moosbrugger’s mental life. Moosbrugger is handled as an Exemplum and as a judicial hermeneutical problem. Consequently, the law must be flexible enough to subsume his case without shattering its own univocity. Here, the different variations of his story, whether it is narrated by a psychiatrist, a judge, Moosbrugger, Ulrich, or society at large, can be interpreted as part of the editorial strategy, common in the Exempla tradition, through which Musil’s novel attempts to allude to the multiple truth of Essayismus, or at the impossibility of totality, or perhaps only to the kind of certainty that one can attain through narrating. Moosbrugger is a parable dealing with how society instates or upholds a state of affairs by narrating. All the controversy around this character is not solely directed at the subjective powers of the mystical experience, but on society producing and interpreting narratives. Each variation on Moosbbruger’s story adheres to a discipline or, in some cases, to an agenda. This framework can make his intentions transparent, but only by depicting his story as the repetition of a generic plot. Consequently, in this context, abstraction also entails the possibility of defining a set of rules, drawing legitimacy from its structure, and conveying an inner form. The multiperspective construction of an ethos embedded in a physical and mental dimension, as well as a social and historical world, means that a character as parable refers to an open concept grounded in indeterminacy and prone to expand its semantic range and focus. But at the same time, this open concept sets the unique personality that could, according to Kierkegaard, be able to become himself by striving for the general. Although the Gleichnis is not directly related to agency, it still represents an inner form related to a character’s ethos, which must be measured, if not by a general idea, at least in relation to the traditional narrative forms. This ethos endows the world with meaning and its construction, which aims at understanding an individual, can be undertaken as if it were a work of art.174 Its || 174 J. Schmidt’s position can be countervailed with Volkmar Altmann’s diagnosis of the romanticism in Ulrich’s discussion: “Und zwar zum einen durch die These, daß die zivilisationsbedingte Entfremdung des Menschen von seiner ‘Natur’ auch auf die künstlerische Produktion durchschlägt, die Kunst als Absolute also allenfalls in infinitesimaler Annährung darzustellen vermag – und zum anderen durch die Einsicht, daß jedes einzelne Kunstwerk aus seiner immanenten Logik heraus perspektivisch strukturiert ist und deshalb das Absolute nur aus der Beschränkung seiner eigenen Perspektivität heraus sichtbar machen kann. Speziell auf die poetische Kunstform bezogen, bedeutet dies: sie stellt sich im Lichte dieser allgemeinen Be-

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inner form is an abstract grounded in the concrete, but its features are conveyed through traditional stylistic devices. Therefore, the absolute abstract of attributelessness and the mystical experience cannot be represented,175 but the less ambitious inner form can. Perspectivistic reduction is thus related to the straight line, not only in terms of perception and Euclidian geometry, but also in terms of narrative structuring. Life in the sense of a narrative thread in which circumstances and their sudden inversion are neatly interwoven appears in urban milieus as a heteronomous abstract. The panoply of single lives that move and are being led simultaneously in a big city cannot be singularly assessed and, since one cannot create continuity and a homogeneous world by manipulating everyday events, all these stories are reduced and boiled down to an abstract, a stereotypical path, the easiest path to imagine and follow. It is a path that repeats itself in different individuals. There might be a couple of careers to choose from, but they follow the same logic of development and aim at enabling someone to become a “bedeutender Mensch.” They represent the thought pattern that impels one to go all the way to “Z” as soon as one has uttered “A”. In view of this incessant repetition, one could be tempted to take seriously the critique that Walter mockingly raises to Ulrich’s proposition that “unser Dasein ganz und gar aus Literatur bestehen sollte!” (MoE 365). For Walter, this intent would place the life of the christian redeemer and Napoleon equally into a realm unrelated to reality, into literature, unless one is able to embody ideas and philosophy: “Würde sie so leben, daß große Philosophie und Dichtung entstünde, oder so, daß alles, was sie lebten, sozusagen schon Philosophie und Dichtung in Fleisch

|| dingungen keineswegs deshalb als eine Metasprache dar, weil sie das Absolute in der Unmittelbarkeit seiner selbst erfaßt; als eine Metasprache wird sie von den Romantikern nur insoweit angesehen, als sie – im Gegensatz zu anderen Sprachformen – dieses Absolute zum einen überhaupt erst zum Gegenstand der Wirklichkeitsreflexion macht und es zum anderen nicht mehr eindimensional, sondern multiperspektivisch, und d. h. in unendlicher Annährung zu erfassen versucht.” Altmann, Totalität und Perspektive, 119. 175 “Die Theorie des Abstrakten als einer allgemeinen ‘objektiven’ Entsprechung der Eigenschaftslosigkeit konnte im Rahmen der Gespräche Ulrichs mit Agathe als ereignisfreier Gedankengang und insofern auch schon abstrakt entwickelt werden. Problematisch aber mußte es sein, die Abstraktion als formales Korrelat des inhaltlichen Programms der Eigenschaftslosigkeit innerhalb des Erzählzusammenhangs zu gestalten. Denn eine schon grundsätzlich paradoxe Gestaltung der zur Gestaltlosigkeit (zur absoluten Gestalt) tendierenden Abstraktion hätte bei konsequenter Durchführung den Roman wie die Erzählungen vollends hermetisch gemacht. Im Ganzen gilt für den Roman und für die Novellen, daß abstrakte Elemente innerhalb des Erzählzusammenhangs nur vereinzelt und lediglich als programmatische Zeichen erscheinen.” Altmann, Totalität und Perspektive, 85.

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und Blut wäre? (MoE 367). The alternative solution to rationality through character construction is implied in what Walter finds to be the only, ludicrous, solution: “[…] Mir scheint es nicht anders möglich zu sein, als daß ein solcher Mensch dann in allen Fällen, wo er nicht gerade der Dichter seines Lebens ist, schlimmer als ein Tier daran wäre; wenn ihm keine Idee einfiele, würde ihm auch keine Entscheidung einfallen, er wäre einfach für einen großen Teil des Lebens seinen Trieben, Launen, den gewöhnlichen Allerweltsleidenschaften, mit einem Wort, dem Allerunpersönlichsten ausgeliefert, woraus ein Mensch nur besteht, und müßte sozusagen, solange die Obstruktion der oberen Leitung andauert, standhaft mit sich machen lassen, was ihm gerade einfällt!?” (MoE 368)

To become a poet of one’s life is the self-legitimizing duty of someone who wants to rely on literature as a compass for life. This entails two obstacles. First, one must control one’s own mental life, otherwise the individual will turn out to be an easy prey for all kinds of psychic phenomena. For instance, Walter argues that the vast majority of these contents seem independent of the person experiencing them. Mood and pulsations construct the abstract husk that is any human. Secondly, the poet in question seems to nourish his works with inspiration, with what comes into his mind, namely, ideas from an unknown origin that sink into consciousness and help formulate an aesthetic decision, or any decision whatsoever. Common to both objections is the lack of agency grounded in the verb “einfallen”. This pun – probably unintended by Walter – undermines Walter’s own criticism. All mental content, decisions and whims come into the mind in the same manner, whether or not it is the mind of a poet, so for Ulrich, the consequence is to embrace active passivismus. Describing mental life and art as concocted in an ineffable cauldron of inspiration takes the quest for autonomy back to its starting point. However, to salvage the figure of the poetic life and get rid of its assumptions about an inspired mind, let us remember the role of the genius in Musil’s novel. The genius artist has already become obsolete in Ulrich’s world. To be a genius is to exceed any adversary in a quantitative race. But the horse of genius together with Tristram’s mule and muleteer are not critical enough to assume the task of giving a biographical account. Walter’s poet might be interested in what crosses his mind and aware of the possible obstacles that a passion or a mental illness might represent for a writer, but still he does not seem to come to terms with the idea that one must be playful with the perspectives one creates. This would be the Nietzschean genius who, according to Heydebrand, has enough distance

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from reality to be critical and starts his work from the concrete.176 This genius would probably bemoan its lot together with Tristram and would strive to come up with some new form, a literary device or structure to add to the stock and not only to the bulk, but never claiming to have found the definitive form, just an emendable form.177 While the perpetual search entailed by this form is symbolized by the Gleichnis and its defining indeterminacy, the method for bringing the singular case to its maximal polysemic extent is the essayistic style.178 Together with the digressive and conversationalist style of Tristram Shandy, Essayismus is the method for becoming oneself when confronted with the lack of an absolute abstract concept and a textual tradition impossible to control. The Self finds its legitimation only momentarily and only if it endeavors to weave narratively an ethos with a thousand strings. Perhaps one could even claim that this Self is only autonomous insofar as it cultivates itself by diving perilously into tradition and pursuing a chimerical biography that, though unfettered from its pragmatic constraints, reveals the unavoidable constraints laid upon it by thought patterns and tradition, thereby exemplifying Lübbe’s hypothetical case: “[E]s kann […] den Fall einer von der Erfüllung von Identitätspräsentationsfunktion freien Geschichtsdarstellung deswegen nicht geben, weil in dieser Freiheit überhaupt kein Prinzip für die Beschreibung einer Geschichte zur Verfügung stünde. Man würde, sozusagen, im Meer der Möglichkeiten ertrinken, als dass die Ineffabilität des Individuellen vor uns liegt.”179 To take up the task of making Gleichnis concrete within a narrative represents an attempt to insert oneself into the the historical flow and gain continuity. But only with the artist’s prowess can one attain an autonomous, tailored ethics or perspective reduction. The Self as a work of art merges, claims Kierkegaard, the concrete with the abstract in a process in which ideality becomes internal: “Der einzige Mensch zu sein, ist an und für sich nichts sonderlich Großes, denn das hat jeder Mensch mit jedem Naturerzeugnis gemein; es aber so zu sein, daß er darin zu gleich das Allgemeine ist, das ist die wahre Lebenskunst.”180 The artistry here involved is twofold in relation to ideality. It alludes || 176 v. Heydebrand, Die Reflexionen Ulrichs, 72–78. 177 “Das Werk ist eine Theorie: es ist eine Form der Erkenntnis, und zwar korrigierbar; denn Theorien werden durch weitere Experimente geprüft. Es ist Theorie eines Ausschnitts aus der Wirklichkeit: es wendet sich einem einzelnen, zusammenhängenden Tatsachen-Komplex zu.” v. Heydebrand, Die Reflexionen Ulrichs, 85. 178 v. Heydebrand, Die Reflexionen Ulrichs, 86. 179 Lübbe, “Zur Identitätspräsentationsfunktion der Historie”, 284. 180 Kierkegaard, Entweder – Oder, 823.

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both to the ability to see the world under a distinctive light, that is, the ability “das tägliche Leben poetisch zu machen”,181 and also to discover forms of experience independent of its actualization.182 For Kierkegaard, to be the poet of one’s own life entails producing an ideal image of the self, and turning this possibility into a task.183 This is possibe because the world itself is poetic: “Das es nun eine poetische Welt ist, in der wir uns bewegen, so beliebt es Dir vielleicht, Deine dichterische Lizenz geltend zu machen“.184 One can change the world, not by manipulating reality, but by circumventing it by means of rhetoric devices, by modulating necessity into freedom, or at least embrace necessity that becomes freedom. But perhaps this last step involves agency, so our protagonists cannot live up to Kierkegaard’s expectations. Ulrich and Tristram linger in the possible and in forms of experience that will never be actualized, or at least not with a definite poetic meaning. For Ulrich, actualization relies on attributes that pertain to a system and instead of expressing agency they will end up serving obscure and heteronomous abstract ends. Perhaps for this reason, Ulrich turns to the Gleichnis in the first book. It represents a mental endeavour that does not necessarily commit to one outcome, or one image; a parable is outlined by an essayist method and its potency lies in its incessant movement. Similarly, Tristram seems unable to pinpoint the events that got actualized. One can fairly assume that they did happen, since he is telling his story from a relatively advanced age, but what got veritably actualized resides in-between the digressions that never depict the events, but explain them, enrich them with erudite citations, and even produce further events. A theory will always reveal further circumstances to consider, and so actualizations are compressed and reduced to a minimum by the pressure of the possible meanings that could be pinned or rather piled up on them. Actualizations are thus not so concrete as one might think. It is rather an individual construed as a Gleichniss that stands behind them and its personality is the concrete core that must be described, since therein lies the meaning of actualizations as repetitions and innovations; therein lies a stance towards modernity. Personality represents the abstract inner form that asserts itself without becoming ankylosed. Its an ethos constructed and construed as a figure of

|| 181 Kierkegaard, Entweder – Oder, 656. 182 “Du weißt, ich hasse alles Experimentieren, dessenungeachtet aber soll es doch auch wahr sein, daß ein Mensch vieles in Gedanken erlebt haben kann, was er in Wirklichkeit niemals erleben wird.” Kierkegaard, Entweder – Oder, 666. 183 Kierkegaard, Entweder – Oder, 824–825. 184 Kierkegaard, Entweder – Oder, 663.

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thought, open and grounded in repetition and a dialogue with tradition. For this reason, moral character can be another name for the inner teleology of a work of art and a poetic life that embrace the concrete.185 The approach to personality as an ethical-aesthetic phenomenon is supported by Kierkegaard’s ethics, which posit a general concept from which to understand all its expressions.186 Its way of tincturing the world indicates a re-appropriation of immediacy, but during a single instant.187 Ultimately, moral character is not only thematized by the mirage of personalities and their hobbyhorsical nature, it is also engrained in the structure as an inner form, the writer’s personal style that stages Tristram’s autobiographical endeavors. Here, one should notice that character as a stylistic conduit does not have the same function in Musil’s novel. Despite the relevance of the concept of personality for the Essayismus as a method and reflective sway, Musil’s narrator is not bound by a fictional autobiographical pact and it is only the individual as a Gleichnis that serves as a point of comparison.

2.4.4 End of the digressive line: life as a stroll with sense of style The individual-as-parable, defined by indeterminateness and an absolute meaning that resides in absence, in virtual modes of explanation never employed in the actual interpretation, is construed as an architectonic, writing, or painting style. These vestiges help us understand where we stand at present, which, according to Ulrich, is crucial if we wish to understand who we are: “Jede Generation fragt erstaunt, wer bin ich und was waren meine Vorgänger? Sie sollte lieber fragen, wo bin ich, und voraussetzen, daß ihre Vorgänger nicht anderswie, sondern bloß anderswo waren; damit wäre schon einiges gewonnen — dachte er” (MoE 361). The environment where we are contingently rooted has a stronger bearing on how we apprehend an “I” than the grounding endeavors undertaken by a self-sufficient and self-determined individual with its inherited traits. To apprehend an “I” one must, after Ulrich’s fashion, acknowledge the surrounding styles, delve into history’s diverse perspectivistic reductions, and embrace their incompleteness: || 185 Kierkegaard, Entweder – Oder, 844. 186 “Gerade wenn man einsieht, daß die Persönlichkeit der absolute, daß sie ihr eigener Zweck, daß sie die Einheit des Allgemeinen und des Einzelnen sei, gerade dann wird jede Skepsis, die das Geschichtliche zu ihrem Ausgangspunkt macht, überwunden sein.” Kierkegaard, Entweder – Oder, 832. 187 “Die wahre konkrete Wahl ist die, durch welche ich im selben Augenblick, da ich mich aus der Welt herauswähle, mich in die Welt zurückwähle.” Kierkegaard, Entweder – Oder, 814.

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Ulrich starrte mit gerunzelter Stirn seine Schwester an. “Ein Mensch, der ein altes Gedicht nicht glättet, sondern in seiner Verwitterung halb zerstörten Sinnes beläßt, ist der gleiche wie jener, der einer alten Statue, der die Nase fehlt, niemals eine aus neuem Marmor aufsetzen wird” dachte er. “Das könnte man Stilgefühl nennen, aber das ist es nicht. Und auch der Mensch ist es nicht, dessen Einbildung so lebhaft ist, daß ihn das Fehlende nicht stört. Sondern es ist eher der Mensch, der auf Vollständigkeit überhaupt keinen Wert legt und darum auch von seinen Empfindungen nicht verlangen wird, daß sie ‘ganz’ seien.” (MoE 704–703)

To pick up a vestige of learning, for instance a poem, in order to unfold it until it acquires a soothing smooth evenness, is simply to refrain from critical thought. It might seem the most natural, even pragmatic thing to do in some cases, but when confronted with the past, our need to establish a measure or coherent standard that can be logically followed to become complete seems as absurd as going all the way to “Z” just because one heard or said “A.” Evenness is associated with the straight line. It represents an offshoot of a thought pattern driven by a rejection of the incomplete and a rationale’s drive. But Ulrich does not propose to settle for incompleteness, he rather points out with his furrowed brow that one should adopt exactly that gesture, embrace the beauty in the ambiguous folds that mark a countenance’s inexhaustible uniqueness and lure one into deciphering their pattern, reflecting on the whole without undertaking any action to achieve it. Ulrich refuses to orientate himself by fulfilling the low- or highbrow requirements. He is not seduced by the intelligibility perks bequeathed by a revered tradition, nor by the relatable charms of contemporary stories. Instead he walks with an astonished expression and a feeling of displacement in a perpetual effort to find his place in the world. During his strolls as a flâneur, he turns his eyes towards vestiges whose continuity is posited for practical reasons, but still one can never assuage the skepticism triggered by the sedimented meaning affecting any action: Er vergaß darüber sogar die andere, nach Maß und Beherrschung verlangende Hälfte seines Wesens. Er hätte seiner Schwester jetzt mit Sicherheit sagen können, daß keine ihrer Handlungen zu ihrer nächsten Umgebung passe, sondern alle von einer höchst fragwürdigen weitesten Umgebung abhängig seien, ja geradezu von einer, die nirgends anfängt und nirgends begrenzt ist, und die widerspruchsvollen Eindrücke des ersten Abends würden damit eine günstige Erklärung gefunden haben. (MoE 705)

This world’s constitutive irony complicates any attempt to orientate oneself. Our actions, despite their instantaneous effect on our current situation, are nourished by the depths of a mental life whose ideas have been accumulating

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through the ages. These ideal circumstances that lack distinct boundaries affect both our passionate reactions and our prudently controlled actions. How to recognize our surroundings and understand where we stand is a concern inseparable from the completion drive and the sense of style, all of which fall under the broader discussion around ethics and aesthetics, the spatial framework, and its perspectival reduction. In this respect, Marie-Louise Roth sets off her seminal study on the topic with the premise that “Bewegung als innerstes Prinzip des Lebens”188 defines both Musil’s oeuvre and her own critical approach to Musil’s ideas. The vibrant inner life as a principle entails a creative impetus, sets in motion a narrative search for the Self and the rechtem Leben, and, consequently, leads to a method. Life as movement is where ethics and aesthetics converge, where partial truths arise, and where the desire for and acknowledgement of necessity cohabits with the will for transformation. To attain awareness of this paradox, Musil comes again and again to the irreducible moment of actual experience, to Erlebnis in the sense of an unformed experience that still retains feeling, thinking, and spirit bounded in a manifold unit. In this manner, the novel opposes absolute values and laws to dynamism, exceptional cases and singular events.189 Continuity is superseded by discontinuity and by the exploration of alternative forms of experience, that is, a panoply of perspectival reductions aiming at one fundamental idea: “die eigene Perspektive des Dichters ist die Suche nach der Vereinigung der rationalen und irrationalen Wirklichkeit.”190 If one translates Roth’s ideas to the context of this investigation, it seems that the sought union – which must not culminate in absolute totality – is the narrative concatenation that merges the factual, in the sense of the observable, and the ideal, in the sense of almost unactualizable possibilities. As a principle whose method is discursive motion, “life” is a unifying force that works as a formless potency and corresponds to the folly that hypostasizes191 its own reduced perspective, its accidents.192 As a method, “life” contends with the com-

|| 188 Marie-Louise Roth, Robert Musil. Ethik und Ästhetik (München: List, 1972), 7. 189 In this paragraph, I draw different ideas from Roth. For inner life as method, see Roth, Robert Musil, 12; for movement in relation to ethics/aesthetics, necessity, and transformation, see 21, 34; for axiology and singular events, see 41–42, 47. 190 Roth, Robert Musil, 51. 191 Roth, Robert Musil, 109. 192 “Der Akzent liegt auf dem Leben, dem Diesseits und seinen vielen Möglichkeiten, dem Individuum, dem ‘Einmaligen’ und dem vereinzelten Ereignis, auf der nicht beobachteten Einsamkeit der bloßen Tatsache.” Roth, Robert Musil, 74. “Aus dem chaotischen, zufälligen Geschehen entsteht also ein Gesetz; aus dem Zufall entspringt Gesetzmäßigkeit. Diese Ansicht

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mon thought patterns that rely blindly on the straight line. Actual living reveals different types of lines. Therefore, the poet’s task is to draw examples from uniqueness – which is a more modern approach to the exemplary in literature – and actively create a concrete ethos, but without reproducing a genre uncritically or impersonally, or relying on the most common reduction among reductions, namely, the straight line.193 A closer look at chapter 34 of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften will evince how tradition, style, autonomy, and straight lines are, similarly to Tristram Shandy, linked to a life concept. For this reason, the upcoming analysis will work as a summary. It will show how, in a general sense, life refers to a story that reveals a moral character and how Ulrich adopts a similar stance. He becomes a voyeur whose hyperactive gaze provokes mental movement by jumping between all the points of the scenery. Comparably to Tristram, Ulrich’s reflections upon the farthest abstract circumstances are connected to a palpable prosaic situation. The plot is simple: After breaking up with Bonadea, Ulrich lets his gaze wander across the insides of his house, which triggers the reflections that will keep him company on his way to Clarisse and Walter’s house. During his walk, Ulrich’s train of thought keeps developing until it arrives at the figure of the fool and the memory of his once rebellious friends, who now embody progress. At this point, he is accidentally interrupted. He bumps into his old friend, the banker Leo Fischel, who is perplexed by a question contiguous with Ulrich’s musing, namely, the devious use of “true” as an adjective for “true” patriot, “true” conviction, etc. Before bumping into each other, both have been walking around pondering over the inconveniences that vicissitude has brought upon the modern experience. Ulrich depicts the problem thusly: “Was diese Renoviersucht des Daseins zu einem Perpetuum mobile macht, ist nichts als das Ungemach, daß zwischen dem nebelhaften eigenen und dem schon zur fremden Schale erstarrten Ich der Vorgänger wieder nur ein Schein-Ich, eine ungefähr passende Gruppenseele eingeschoben wird” (MoE 132). Between an undifferentiated Self and a rigid vase there is a constant change that lets us wander between a diaphanous Self, || führt zu der Annahme, dass der undeterminierte Zufall das Primäre und das nicht weiter Erklärbare ist.” Roth, Robert Musil, 75. For the relation to folly, see 109. 193 “Im Gegensatz zu einer erstarrten, normierten, äußeren Moral, die einem autoritären vorgesetzten System oder Gesetz unterworfen ist und der Erfahrung des Lebens widerspricht, bleibt die ethische Reaktion als Erlebnis der Innenzone mit der menschlichen Konfiguration und den konkreten Lebenszuständen wie dem sachlichen Sinngehalt verbunden – Musil spricht von einer ‘dynamischen Moral’, von einem ‘aktiven Ethos’, einer Moral, ‘die unseren Tatsachen gewachsen wäre…’” Roth, Robert Musil, 91. See also 90, 264, 269.

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a conventional group soul, and the ossified past. Now the problem for Ulrich is that a critical mind endowed with a frictionless mechanism would become a perpetual motion machine. Giving free rein to the mind might wear our strength down or deter us from any attempt to solidify a Self because a scrupulous thinker would never stop long enough to commit to an idea and gain some agency. A more optimistic view would be the Kierkegaardian consideration that this motion represents the continuous task of becoming oneself: Man braucht es sich ja bloß vorzustellen: wenn außen eine schwere Welt auf Zunge, Händen und Augen liegt, der erkaltete Mond aus Erde, Häusern, Sitten, Bildern und Büchern, — und innen ist nichts wie ein haltlos beweglicher Nebel: welches Glück es bedeuten muß, sobald einer einen Ausdruck vormacht, in dem man sich selbst zu erkennen vermeint. Ist irgend etwas natürlicher, als daß jeder leidenschaftliche Mensch sich noch vor den gewöhnlichen Menschen dieser neuen Form bemächtigt?! Sie schenkt ihm den Augenblick des Seins, des Spannungsgleichgewichtes zwischen innen und außen, zwischen Zerpreßtwerden und Zerfliegen. Auf nichts anderem beruht — dachte Ulrich, und natürlich berührte ihn alles das auch persönlich; er hatte die Hände in den Taschen, […] auf nichts anderem, dachte er, beruht also auch die immerwährende Erscheinung, die man neue Generation, Väter und Söhne, geistige Umwälzung, Stilwechsel, Entwicklung, Mode und Erneuerung nennt. (Moe 131–132)

What joy Ulrich would feel if he could experience the instant in which the body as an external dimension of identity and its surrounding culture merge in an expression that internalizes all elements, appropriates them, and incorporates them into the inner life. In this instant, a form or style that once was an external abstract becomes an expression with concrete features: when the elements which rest upon the ever-changing times touch our foggy Self they precipitate like a liquid, fall like rain due to gravity, and sieve into the depths of the inner life. Here, neither the content nor the form, but the gesture performed by a passionate individual grounds any claim on intelligibility and makes it possible to find a balance between body and mind. However, due to his personality, Ulrich cannot easily commit to an expression. Although it concerns him personally, his hands are in his pockets, denoting his neutral stance. Nothing more than fuzz is in his hands. His uncommitted posture highlights his inability to decide and act. Since he can never be certain which part of reality is in his hands, there is nothing feasible in view. However, this applies only to the attempts to manipulate the world, whereas he could be said to be mentally and literally always on his feet. Despite his abulia, Ulrich could not put his ideas in motion without strolling and indulging in a flâneur’s lifestyle. His wandering reveals his active effort not to do anything, although he could. His physical prowess is a fact, for

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the narrator claims: “Er bemühte sich, freundlich und nachgiebig zu gehen. In einem gymnastisch durchgebildeten Körper liegt soviel Bereitschaft zu Bewegung und Kampf, daß es ihn heute unangenehm anmutete wie das Gesicht eines alten Komödianten, das voll oft gespielter unwahrer Leidenschaften ist” (MoE 129). Ulrich could potentially do anything, but his corporeal readiness is not his own. It still belongs to his youth in the cavalry, to a stable world order that grounded convictions and now evokes for him an unreal incongruence. Hence, he decides only to stay on his feet: In der gleichen Weise hatte das Streben nach Wahrheit sein Inneres mit Bewegungsformen des Geistes angefüllt, es in gut gegeneinander exerzierende Gruppen von Gedanken zerlegt und ihm einen, streng genommen, unwahren und komödienhaften Ausdruck gegeben, den alles, sogar die Aufrichtigkeit selbst, in dem Augenblick annimmt, wo sie zur Gewohnheit wird. (MoE 129)

At least one of Ulrich’s habits grants him instants of congruence. Though independently of any content, his strolling mind harmonizes with his walking pace. There is a certain rhythm, a counterpoint nourished by his moral character which serves as a compositional principle expressed in the various facets of his life. What characterizes both his body and mind is the fear of coming to a standstill. Thanks to his mental swaying and strolling through the city, some elements from his environment can momentarily become concrete. This double movement is, paradoxically, the source of his malady. The constant change in perspectives blurs the contours of objects, physically and conceptually, which makes congruency between actions and decision a mere optical illusion. Ulrich has the habit of dismembering any idea that appears in front of him. It is not so much a matter of contradicting but rather of dissecting the comments, books and all which comes into his idle hands. A penchant for analysis is the form that governs his mind and actions, since he endeavors to transform himself into a tabula rasa. He dismembers his inactive Self to find its boundaries. However, total inaction would never reveal anything besides emptiness, so the minimum action that posits harmony between his split body and mind is a walk. In contrast with the Shandean Sentiment, which posits a gesticulation as an immediate form of communication grounded in perception and independent of language, for Ulrich, when a performance becomes a habit, it turns into a gimmick that has lost its link to its environment. What is a tragic or meaningful

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event the first time; the second time, it turns, by virtue of repetition, into comedy.194 Now, Ulrich has an opinion on comedians that seems to comply with what Gilbert Ryle calls the intellectualist legend.195 Ulrich assumes that a clown’s trips and tumbles do not represent an execution enabled by hard-to-come-by skills,196 nor a performance whose repetitions are never the same. He overlooks the performative aspect linked to moral character and instead focuses – at least at this point – on the intentions and the inaccessible mental processes that would endow any gesticulation with meaning. For Ulrich, autonomy resides in a gesture where motion, meaning, and circumstances converge in a moment whose repetition is impossible. Ulrich’s true comedian must incessantly create unique gestures just to avoid repeating a motion. Considered from the side of its sameness, a repetition won’t be intentional, just mindless; nor will it be laughable, since it does not relate to the actual circumstance; and its meaning, after a while, will become obscure. The high standards imposed on autonomy stand in the way of any attempt to capture the moment of concretion. From a broader perspective, these standards lead to the problem already analysed in the first part of this study: “In einem solchen Augenblick mag nichts so fern liegen wie die Vorstellung, daß das Leben, das sie führen, und das sie führt, die Menschen nicht viel, nicht innerlich angeht” (MoE 129). Ulrich expresses his concern regarding the contingency that imposed a cultural surrounding upon him and left him only with a discomfiting feeling: “ein beunruhigendes Gefühl: alles, was ich zu erreichen meine, erreicht mich; eine nagende Vermutung, daß in dieser Welt die unwahren, achtlosen und persönlich unwichtigen Äußerungen kräftiger widerhallen werden als die eigensten und eigentlichen” (MoE 129). Beginning with this || 194 This will be tackled in the last part, with the help of Gilles Deleuze’s take on Karl Marx. 195 “To put it quite generally, the absurd assumption made by the intellectualist legend is this, that a performance of any sort inherits all its title to intelligence from some anterior internal operation of planning what to do. Now very often we do go through such a process of planning what to do, and, if we are silly, our planning is silly, if shrewd, our planning is shrewd.” Ryle, The Concept of Mind, 20. 196 For Ryle, skill is an active judgement, not the repetition of a gesture (28, 30). This is evident in his take on a clown: “The cleverness of the clown may be exhibited in his tripping and tumbling. He trips and tumbles just as clumsy people do, except that he trips and tumbles on purpose and after much rehearsal and at the golden moment and where the children can see him and so as not to hurt himself. The spectators applaud his skill at seeming clumsy, but what they applaud is not some extra hidden performance executed ‘in his head’. It is his visible performance that they admire, but they admire it not for being an effect of any hidden internal causes but for being an exercise of a skill.” Ryle, The Concept of Mind, 21.

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qualm, his doubts about his judgment unfold. A judgement falls only upon the things that contingency brings before him. So he asks: Diese Schönheit? — hat man gedacht — ganz gut, aber ist es die meine? Ist denn die Wahrheit, die ich kennenlerne, meine Wahrheit? Die Ziele, die Stimmen, die Wirklichkeit, all dieses Verführerische, das lockt und leitet, dem man folgt und worein man sich stürzt: — ist es denn die wirkliche Wirklichkeit, oder zeigt sich von der noch nicht mehr als ein Hauch, der ungreifbar auf der dargebotenen Wirklichkeit ruht?! (MoE 129)

Every time Ulrich walks, his life undergoes a dissociative process in which the harmony between its constitutive elements is lost. Body and mind never move in the same direction. Any action or movement creates a chasm between his actions and decisions that gradually broadens and makes him lose his grip on agency. However, Ulrich does make pragmatic decisions in spite of his reluctance to choose a framework: “Es war ungefähr vier Uhr Nachmittag, und er beschloß, den Weg ganz langsam zu Fuß zurückzulegen” (MoE 129). This meaningless decision might undermine his principles. But for Ulrich, when it comes to embracing a method that fundamentally affects his life, the only viable option is to walk. By doing so, he is prone to lose himself, since he creates a situation in which he can ask: “where am I?” In this way, he reproduces the feeling that the immortal Aquinas – as depicted in the novel – might have had, folios in hand, when he was about to get run over by an electric tram after leaving his house for the first time in hundreds of years. To refuse to hop into new means of transportation is the same as to refuse a mode of construing life grounded in epoch-changing technology. Hence, by becoming a pedestrian, Ulrich probably tries to go back to the primal experience of finding out where one is before one is swept away by life: Alles, was man fühlt und tut, geschieht irgendwie “in der Richtung des Lebens”, und die kleinste Bewegung aus dieser Richtung hinaus ist schwer oder erschreckend. Das ist schon genau so, wenn man einfach nur geht: man hebt den Schwerpunkt, schiebt ihn vor und läßt ihn fallen; aber eine Kleinigkeit daran verändert, ein bißchen Scheu vor diesem Sich-in-die-Zukunft-Fallenlassen oder bloß Verwunderung darüber — und man kann nicht mehr aufrecht stehn! Man darf nicht darüber nachdenken. (MoE 128)

Life’s course, or at least its most common conduits and main direction, are easy to identify and follow. However, there is still something amiss as soon as one steps into life’s current. An individual’s original balance will inevitably undergo a slight change. A shift in its gravitational center will reveal a new image and perspective which casts doubt on the vertical axis. During one’s strolls and

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wanderings, a person can let go and fall into the next step and into the future, but such a way of confronting time is rife with dangers. Each step will slightly deform one’s back until one is not able to stand straight anymore, so certainty is lost. One ignores whether one is on the right path, doing right or at least has the right conviction, and begins to wander through unrecognizable landscapes or maybe through romantic ruins: “Es sind die fertigen Einteilungen und Formen des Lebens, was sich dem Mißtrauen so spürbar macht, das Seinesgleichen, dieses von Geschlechtern schon Vorgebildete, die fertige Sprache nicht nur der Zunge, sondern auch der Empfindungen und Gefühle. Ulrich war vor einer Kirche stehengeblieben” (MoE 129). This wanderer and his world are not in harmony anymore. Ulrich can stop for a moment and look at the remnants of the old homogeneous world, but he cannot stretch his back to stand upright and assess which stage of the upward movement he stands in. However, Ulrich neither wishes to return to a past world, nor eschews any relation to this “zu Millionen Zentnern Stein verhärtete Welt” (MoE 130) because solidified forms nourish change and transformation. A church’s stonework is the moral material with which fools and great minds work to bring about the future: “Es mag sein, daß es den meisten Menschen eine Annehmlichkeit und Unterstützung bedeutet, die Welt bis auf ein paar persönliche Kleinigkeiten fertig vorzufinden, und es soll in keiner Weise in Zweifel gezogen werden, daß das im Ganzen Beharrende nicht nur konservativ, sondern auch das Fundament aller Fortschritte und Revolutionen ist“ (MoE 130). Though an antiquated conception serves as the foundation for any revolution, to give a complete picture one might add that there are further buildings that dress a city with flair. In a metropolis such as Vienna, history has left various styles cohabiting against their will, a vast architectonical array: Es drang Ulrich, während er mit vollem Verständnis für die architektonische Feinheit das heilige Bauwerk betrachtete, überraschend lebhaft ins Bewußtsein, daß man genau so leicht Menschen fressen könnte, wie solche Sehenswürdigkeiten zu bauen oder stehen zu lassen. Die Häuser daneben, die Himmelsdecke darüber, überhaupt eine unaussprechliche Übereinstimmung in allen Linien und Räumen, die den Blick aufnahmen und leiteten, das Aussehen und der Ausdruck der Leute, die unten vorbeigingen, ihre Bücher und ihre Moral, die Bäume auf der Straße… (MoE 130)

The sense of style can move equally toward devotion and/or cannibalism. It all depends on the cultural surroundings motivating a mind to step into a perspectivistic reduction, and even internalizing it because the environment can leave a mark and model the nebulous Self: “[D]as alles ist ja manchmal so steif wie

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spanische Wände und so hart wie der geschnittene Stempel einer Presse und so — man kann gar nicht anders sagen als vollständig, so vollständig und fertig, daß man ein überflüssiger Nebel daneben ist“ (MoE 131). But despite this grave and pressing influence on the Self, the ability to understand a style can be cultivated to achieve a certain neutrality or openness to styles from different epochs. One could even follow Ulrich’s example, who hesitates to adhere to a tradition or school of thought and depicts the world as a pastiche. By doing so, he seems to develop his taste in such a way that his attempt to orientate himself in the world strives to encompass all possible styles, either by finding the original potency that endows the world with meaning and dissolves any dissonance, or by creating a multi-perspectivism as a by-product of his transit through all possible discourses. Ulrich, like Tristram, is a voyeur in life, but frozen in awe of a multifaceted complex that could be grasped from any of its solidified handles: Er blickte umher, seine Umgebung betrachtend. Alle diese Olinien, Kreuzlinien, Geraden, Schwünge und Geflechte, aus denen sich eine Wohnungseinrichtung zusammensetzt und die sich um ihn angehäuft hatten, waren weder Natur noch innere Notwendigkeit, sondern starrten bis ins Einzelne von barocker Überüppigkeit. Der Strom und Herzschlag, der beständig durch alle Dinge unserer Umgebung fließt, hatte einen Augenblick ausgesetzt. Ich bin nur zufällig, feixte die Notwendigkeit; ich sehe nicht wesentlich anders aus als das Gesicht eines Lupuskranken, wenn man mich ohne Vorurteil betrachtet, gestand die Schönheit. (MoE 128)

In the instant of quietude, necessity and beauty – stripped of their most immediate or common-sensical fundament – lose their compelling force. Stillness is the trigger thrusting Ulrich into the reflections developed in this chapter. A pause in life makes him aware of his surroundings and of the arbitrary furnishings in his house and inner life.197 Here, one could even dare to imagine that, though the lines are abstractions imposed on Ulrich,198 life’s pause and Ulrich’s

|| 197 Mülder-Bach, Robert Musil, 81–87. 198 Jochen Schmidt understands this passage as the unavoidable dissipation of the substance. However, one could focus at the method and gesture that dismember the world. “Doch bedeutet der Wirklichkeitszerfall bis zum Abstrakten hin keineswegs eine Läuterung zum Wesentlichen. Das Abstrakte ist nur ein ausgebrannter Rest von Wirklichkeit – ‘weder Natur noch innere Notwendigkeit’ (MoE 128), wie es in exakt zitierender Wendung gegen Kandinskys Hauptargument zur Begründung der abstrakten Kunst heißt: Die – hier nicht mathematisch aufgefaßte – Abstraktion reduziert weder die äußere ‘Natur’ zur gültigen Formel, noch gibt sie die Essenz des ‘Inneren’. Sie verliert zwar ihre ehemals scheinhafte Aufdringlichkeit. Insofern ist Abstraktion ein Fortschritt im Sinne des Programms der Eigenschaftslosigkeit. Aber das hergestellte Abstrakte – und dies gilt analog für die Eigenschaftslosigkeit – bietet sowenig wie

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inquiring gaze were accompanied by a gesture, a furrowing brow enacting and laying bare his disposition to understand his own convoluted Self as inner and outer architectonical folds: [A]ber wie gesagt, es wäre auch nicht unmöglich, die breiten, ruhig hängenden Formen und das Filigran des Faltenwerks an einer ehrwürdigen Matrone schön zu finden, es ist bloß einfacher, zu sagen, sie sei alt. Und dieser Übergang vom Alt- zum Schönfinden der Welt ist ungefähr der gleiche wie jener von der Gesinnung der jungen Menschen zu der höheren Moral der Erwachsenen, die so lange ein lächerliches Lehrstück bleibt, bis man sie mit einemmal selbst hat. (MoE 130)

Apart from condemning the simplification of handed down ideas and a naive relation to age, this commentary transforms straight lines, which are the result of a perspectivistic reduction, into a far more complicated kind of line: wrinkles. The marks that time leaves on a face are groups of lines arbitrarily arranged as an indecipherable corrugation. If one were to try and discern their form, it would be hard to describe the particularities of each line, but this does not mean that they do not follow a certain order. By taking a closer look, one could start speculating about their different patterns and argue that they were carved by sheer habit. Folds of sadness and cogitation might appear in different locations, but these ornaments are flexible and prone to merge, giving thereby the impression of being part of a whole. Wrinkles become a map in our imagination. Furthermore, when thinking about faces, or when one is in front of somebody, there is a moment of self-reflexivity in which the body is involved. To go back to the sense of style, for Ulrich, the mien with which we see one another denotes a disposition to judge, and, additionally, it conveys that, despite the possible effects that a gesture has on thought, there is a moment in which we seem to think corporally, or at least stare with doubt. A gesture of incomprehension, denoting distrust of our prejudices and our preconceived ideas when facing a countenance furrowed by habits and reactions to its social milieu, is a gesture comparable, on the one hand, to the Sentiment in Tristram Shandy. On the other hand, the relation of a countenance to immediacy and perception could be also tackled from a Kierkegaardian perspective and considered as the embodiment of doubting despair, that is, a moment in which the incongruence between body and mind, between the actual world and our ideal picture of it, seem to come together, but only in despair, in knowing that any choice will be

|| der Abstraktionsprozeß eine neue Substanz. Es ist nur die Negation des alten Scheinwerts. Hier liegt das entscheidende Problem.” Schmidt, Ohne Eigenschaften, 77.

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wrong. This interpretation, however, would surpass what can be grounded in the text, since it never posits that a life’s story could be reconstructed by tracing back the marks it left on a face. Instead, Ulrich’s reflections leave us with this thought: “Im Grunde wissen in den Jahren der Lebensmitte wenig Menschen mehr, wie sie eigentlich zu sich selbst gekommen sind, zu ihren Vergnügungen, ihrer Weltanschauung, ihrer Frau, ihrem Charakter, Beruf und ihren Erfolgen, aber sie haben das Gefühl, daß sich nun nicht mehr viel ändern kann” (MoE 130). This feeling of constraining necessity becomes more problematic when we are not in a face-to-face encounter,199 but have only read about someone’s deeds and opinions: [W]ie wenn eines Tags plötzlich ein Mensch dasitzt, mit dem man zwanzig Jahre lang korrespondiert hat, ohne ihn zu kennen, und man hat ihn sich ganz anders vorgestellt. Noch viel sonderbarer aber ist es, daß die meisten Menschen das gar nicht bemerken; sie adoptieren den Mann, der zu ihnen gekommen ist, dessen Leben sich in sie eingelebt hat, seine Erlebnisse erscheinen ihnen jetzt als der Ausdruck ihrer Eigenschaften, und sein Schicksal ist ihr Verdienst oder Unglück. Es ist etwas mit ihnen umgegangen wie ein Fliegenpapier mit einer Fliege; es hat sie da an einem Härchen, dort in ihrer Bewegung festgehalten und hat sie allmählich eingewickelt, bis sie in einem dicken Überzug begraben liegen, der ihrer ursprünglichen Form nur ganz entfernt entspricht. (MoE 131)

For Ulrich, attaining agency by means of a narrative account is difficult, not only because we can never be certain that when we finally meet a lifelong pen pal we are dealing with the same person who wrote to us year after year, but also because even if we are, there is no reason to believe that what this individual underwent is personally related to her or him. That is only a mirage produced by narrative cohesive force. This force posits necessity, and a world that the reader with a sense of style completes to such an extent that he or she ends up ascribing attributes on the basis of the narrated deeds. Furthermore, when we meet this person, we start behaving according to his or her rank and status, never doubting that we are dealing with a self-made individual, and not one trapped like a fly in some sticky circumstance. This human-fly tries to present itself according to what it has at hand, namely, narrations to glue itself to, but every time the human-fly reaches out to grab a stylistic device it becomes more entangled in tradition until it finally acquires an extraneous coating. It has become impossible to free oneself: “Im Grunde drücken diese [Fluchtbewegun|| 199 I have been trying to explore the sense of style with the crucial role of the face-to-face in Levinasian ethics in mind.

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gen] bloß aus, daß nichts von allem, was der junge Mensch unternimmt, aus dem Innern heraus notwendig und eindeutig erscheint, wenn sie es auch in der Weise ausdrücken, als ob alles, worauf er sich gerade stürzt, überaus unaufschiebbar und notwendig wäre” (MoE 131). To embrace the concrete features of one’s life and employ them towards a general concept would be the kind of freedom that Kierkegaard proposes as a solution to the question about leading a life. The focus on the concrete also complies with the first reflections that Ulrich develops in relation to his house’s furniture and inner life. After discarding the idea of designing all his furniture, Ulrich decides to rely on a broker because that is the only way to delve into arbitrariness: Es muß der Mensch in seinen Möglichkeiten, Plänen und Gefühlen zuerst durch Vorurteile, Überlieferungen, Schwierigkeiten und Beschränkungen jeder Art eingeengt werden wie ein Narr in seiner Zwangsjacke, und erst dann hat, was er hervorzubringen vermag, vielleicht Wert, Gewachsenheit und Bestand; – es ist in der Tat kaum abzusehen, was dieser Gedanke bedeutet! Nun, der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, der in seine Heimat zurückgekehrt war, tat auch den zweiten Schritt, um sich von außen, durch die Lebensumstände bilden zu lassen, er überließ an diesem Punkt seiner Überlegungen die Einrichtung seines Hauses einfach dem Genie seiner Lieferanten, in der sicheren Überzeugung, daß sie für die Überlieferung, Vorurteile und Beschränktheit schon sorgen würden. (MoE 20–21)

Only thanks to the constraints imposed by folly can one dream to bring about something, but one could never dream of creating something that can escape prejudices and tradition. This idea reveals that, for Ulrich, whether prejudices are produced in his or the deliverer’s mind is inconsequential. The only advantage in relying on somebody else is that one can avoid any claim on authorship and perhaps accountability. This concern is related to Tristram’s desperate cry about the narrative forms in which we give an account of ourselves. One tends to repeat the same patterns without adding so much to the stock of stylistic devices: “Irgend jemand erfindet einen schönen neuen Gestus, einen äußeren oder einen inneren — Wie übersetzt man das? Eine Lebensgebärde? Eine Form, in die das Innere strömt wie das Gas in einen Glasballon? Einen Ausdruck des Indrucks? Eine Technik des Seins?” (MoE 131) A new gesture, as a novel way to relate to life, would be the only palliative for the modern condition. But this gesture would have to maintain a fresh relation to the inner and outer dimensions and never become a

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stale repetition whose form obscures, with time, how one construes the world.200 This image of a gas balloon is connected to moral character, but here it leads Ulrich to think about the principle of insufficient reason and how we use the adjective “wahre” instead of having faith in our own field of expertise. According to Leo Fischel, one is seldom in a position to be rational because the idea of progress can require acting contrary to our knowledge and convictions: Darum haben die tüchtigen und arbeitsamen Menschen, außer auf ihrem engsten Fachgebiet, keine Überzeugung, die sie nicht sofort preisgeben würden, wenn sie einen äußeren Druck dagegen spüren; man könnte geradezu sagen, sie sehen sich aus Gewissenhaftigkeit gezwungen, anders zu handeln, als sie denken. (MoE 135)

This would leave a lot of people with a sour aftertaste, so Fischel recommends: “[S]o muß man sich in vielen Fällen damit begnügen, nicht allzu eingehend über eine Sache nachzudenken” (MoE 137). Progress, in this context, is comparable to what the straight line conveys. It is a metaphor akin to the Parallel Campaign, whose manner of relating to actuality is contentless. Progress represents a social impetus that is not even aware of its form, but Graf Leinsdorf considers it to be the right one: “Denn so bestand in diesem Zeitpunkt, ohne daß irgend jemand eine sachliche Vorstellung zu haben brauchte, schon ein Netz von Bereitschaft, das einen großen Zusammenhang umspannte; und man darf wohl behaupten, daß dies die richtige Reihenfolge ist” (MoE 137).

2.5 One concern with two structuring procedures Until now, the perusal of the truth concept was carried out with different goals in mind. Firstly, it supported, through close reading, different claims advanced in the chapter on rationality; secondly, it meticulously described the narrative edges that characterize the issue in both novels. But now, after reading this chapter, it will seem that the previous discussion was a digression guided by the sole purpose of tangentially explaining what “form” refers to. In this chapter, “form” is the keyword that helps us understand the similarities between Der

|| 200 A gesture that never congeals as a means to tackle an ethical-aesthetic problem is related to what Roth describes as a crisis of ideals: “Die Überhebung der Ideale über die Menschen hat als Folge, dass sie deren Zwecken nicht mehr entsprechen und als leere Begriffshüllen ohne lebendige Beziehung zu den Bedürfnissen und Vorstellungen des Individuums erstarren.” Roth, Robert Musil. Ethik und Ästhetik, 71.

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Mann ohne Eigenschaften and Tristram Shandy, as well as the central role of moral character and its, so to speak, style. In the context of this investigation, “form” alludes to the structuring principles that the resignification of the life concept implies, as well as the form that can be derived from the narrative structure and its diverse articulations. Following Jurij Lotman, an idea is the indeterminate moment in a train of thought. It acquires its first determination with the plan or blueprint that will form the basis for its realization.201 The blueprints attain coherence by drawing regularity from a compositional principle that is observable and embedded in its structure, a principle that, for its part, is grounded in a form of knowledge, a rationale, or a symbolic form. The idea and the form are ethical to the same degree as they are aesthetic, so they can be unearthed by analyzing the textual devices through which they are conveyed and whose concatenation – either digressive or essayistic – is the realization of an idea and model for reality. At first glance, this is more striking in the case of Tristram. His narration springs from a narratively posited consciousness depicted in the process of forming itself through a narrative motion. This motion shows how this consciousness prefigures a biography’s historical field without being in total control of its utterances. Tristram narrates and simultaneously attempts to critically assess his narration’s tenets. That Tristram considers himself an historian is accurate insofar as he is trying to reveal what really happened and what is presently happening in his mind. Therefore, his endeavor is comparable to Hayden White’s reflections.202 To illustrate how his moral character was and is formulating itself, Tristram grapples with the constitutive concepts of the historical field, or better said, with the ethical-aesthetic field that his consciousness produces through representations. Mind and representations converge in the motif of the straight line. Both Tristram Shandy and Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften sever the prescriptive statements from the descriptive and analytical statements, all of which are muddled up in the traditional textual devices used to give an account of oneself. Their verbal models actualize and at the same time lay bare the cognitive operations that define the form one is giving to oneself, a form of experience ingrained in a narrative form. From this perspective, the straight line seems to designate something similar to what Cassirer coined as the symbolic form. This form functions as consciousness unity, which determines the relations between objects and their || 201 Lotman, The Structure of the Artistic Text, 12. See footnote 192. 202 White, Metahistory, X. See footnote 221.

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qualities, by positing the categories in which to describe said objects.203 Form is an intellectual synthesis whose study can help us further elaborate Kierkegaard’s concerns and show how “die reine Funktion des Geistigen selbst im Sinnlichen ihre Konkrete Erfüllung suchen muß“.204 To make the world intelligible and transform it into a representation is also the Kierkegaardian task that seeks to ground universalizations in the concrete; it alludes to a synthesis comparable to the perspectivistic reduction that reveals the cardinal points. For Ulrich and Tristram, the mental effort required to orientate themselves in the world is not a matter of finding their way in a unified spatio-temporal framework, but of disregarding any pragmatic constraints, delving into the diverse available worlds, and identifying the minimal divergences that ensue when one constantly shifts the way in which one relates to and represents objects. This is possible, argues Cassirer, when one dissociates thinking from a concept of being that defines all the shapes and figures in the world,205 that is, when one buries and mourns, with Ulrich, the old worldview whose substantive principle

|| 203 Ernst Cassirer, Philosophie der Symbolischen Formen. I Die Sprache, Gesammelte Werke Hamburger Ausgabe vol. 11 (Hamburg: Meiner, 2001), 32. 204 Cassirer, Philosophie der Symbolischen Formen, 17. Also revealing in this context: “Alle Erkenntnis geht zuletzt, so verschieden auch ihre Wege und Wegrichtungen sein mögen, darauf aus, die Vielheit der Erscheinungen der Einheit des ‘Satzes vom Grunde’ zu unterwerfen. Das Einzelne soll nicht als Einzelnes stehen bleiben, sondern es soll sich einem Zusammenhang einreihen, in dem es als Glied eines, sei es logischen, sei es teleologischen oder kausalen ‘Gefüges’ erscheint. Auf dieses wesentliche Ziel: auf die Einfügung des Besonderen in eine universelle Gesetzes- und Ordnungsform, bleibt die Erkenntnis wesentlich gerichtet. Aber neben dieser Form der intellektuellen Synthesis, die sich im System der wissenschaftlichen Begriffe darstellt und auswirkt, stehen im Ganzen des geistigen Lebens andere Gestaltungsweisen. Auch sie lassen sich als gewisse Weisen der ‘Objektivierung’ bezeichnen: d. h. als Mittel, ein Individuelles zu einem Allgemeingültigen zu erheben; aber sie erreichen dieses Ziel der Allgemeingültigkeit auf einem völlig anderen Wege als auf dem des logischen Begriffs und des logischen Gesetzes. Jede echte geistige Grundfunktion hat mit der Erkenntnis den einen entscheidenden Zug gemeinsam, daß ihr eine ursprünglich-bildende, nicht bloß eine nachbildende Kraft innewohnt.” (6–7) 205 For the diverse manners of representation, see Cassirer, Philosophie der Symbolischen Formen, 5. The relationship between being and intelligibility: “Ein einzelnes, besonderes und beschränktes Seiende wird herausgegriffen, um aus ihm alles andere genetisch abzuleiten und zu ‘erklären’. Diese Erklärung verharrt demnach, so wechselvoll sie sich inhaltlich auch gestalten mag, ihrer allgemeinen Form nach doch stets innerhalb derselben methodischen Grenzen. Anfangs ist es ein selbst noch sinnliches Einzeldasein, ein konkreter ‘Urstoff’, der als letzter Grund für die Gesamtheit der Erscheinungen aufgestellt wird; dann wendet sich die Erklärung ins Ideelle, und an Stelle dieses Stoffes tritt bestimmter ein rein gedankliches ‘Prinzip’ der Ableitung und Begründung heraus.” (1)

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was embodied by the emperor. After dismissing the idea of a unitary concept of Being governing thought, one can endeavor to understand the image of the world not as a product but as a snapshot of the incessant mental activity that configures the world. Although a mind can always choose a principle to define its form,206 this flexibility entails the loss of homogeneity. Attainable knowledge does not spring from a closed cosmos. Without a cohesive element, all the phenomena offered up to an observer will always appear to be placed one after the other, but lacking the order,207 let us say, instantiated by the epic or by Moosbrugger’s chthonic powers. To exemplify the extent of Moosbrugger’s mental activity, Strawson’s reflections on monads come in handy. If one momentarily concedes that “the model of a monad is a mind,” then one can argue that “the uniqueness of the monad […] supposed to be guaranteed by a certain kind of description”208 is its unique point of view, because monads are indiscernibles that answer to a tailored description in general and universal terms. The monad was called by Leibniz a “complete notion of an individual. It was characteristic of a description of this type that it was a description of an individual, but also, in a certain sense, a description of the entire universe. It was a description, or representation, of the entire universe from a certain point of view. Its being in this way a universally exhaustive description was what guaranteed the uniqueness of its application.”209 The monadic description is what a biographical account in Moosbrugger’s terms would amount to, in other words, a story that would acquit him, show that he is innocent in his world and how no murder at all took place because his

|| 206 “Statt mit der dogmatischen Metaphysik nach der absoluten Einheit der Substanz zu fragen, in die alles besondere Dasein zurückgehen soll, wird jetzt nach einer Regel gefragt, die die konkrete Mannigfaltigkeit und Verschiedenheit der Erkenntnisfunktionen beherrscht und die sie, ohne sie aufzuheben und zu zerstören, zu einem einheitlichen Tun, zu einer in sich geschlossenen geistigen Aktion zusammenfaßt. […] [Erkenntnis] ist eine Gestaltung des Mannigfaltigen, die von einem spezifischen, damit aber zugleich von einem in sich selbst klar und scharf begrenzten Prinzip geleitet wird.” Cassirer, Philosophie der Symbolischen Formen, 6. 207 “Läßt sich kein allgemeines Gesetz aufweisen, kraft dessen die eine geistige Form mit Notwendigkeit aus der anderen hervorgeht, bis schließlich die ganze Reihe der geistigen Gestaltungen gemäß diesem Prinzip durchlaufen ist – so läßt sich, wie es scheint, der Inbegriff dieser Gestaltungen nicht mehr als ein in sich geschlossener Kosmos denken. Die einzelnen Formen stehen dann einfach nebeneinander: Sie lassen sich zwar ihrem Umfang nach übersehen und in ihrer Besonderheit beschreiben, aber es drückt sich in ihnen nicht mehr ein gemeinsamer ideeller Gehalt aus.” Cassirer, Philosophie der Symbolischen Formen, 14. 208 Strawson, Individuals, 121. 209 Strawson, Individuals, 121.

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actions at that moment were as innocuous as removing a wood splinter from his palm. From this point of view, an individual understood as a monad represents a “conceptual truth” that originates in its mental activity. Moosbrugger can instantiate at will any perceptually unique point of view with his power of hallucination.210 However, this framework that dissipates any incongruity in the world also vanishes the question of perspectivistic reduction, since by instantiating a world Moosbrugger does not even need to rely on representations. Without representations, it is impossible to speak about perspectivistic reduction as a symbolic from because a the form and thought patterns of a consciousness are constructed by a continuous development of representations.211 Like a central perspective that can be derived from the composition of a picture, the representations produced by the mind respond to a unique set of principles reproduced in any further representation. This means that Cassirer attributes to the mind a flexibility that contends with Kant’s apriori approach to perception. For Cassirer, any fixed point in space and time is mere abstraction, and it is only in representations that we are to find concrete “material” from which to extrapolate – not deduce – a specific and, let us say, momentary modal relation between a given and its phenomenal and arbitrary presentation.212

|| 210 “For the meaning of ‘instantiated’ cannot be its most usual philosophical meaning, i.e., very roughly, ‘occurring at some time or place in our common spatio-temporal framework’; since this interpretation presupposes a conceptual scheme the ultimate validity of which is denied by the whole system. Instead, to give a meaning to ‘instantiated’, we must hark back to the analogy of individual consciousnesses and perceptual views, and think of the instantiation of a complete concept as at least something like the creation of a unitary series of perceptual and other states of consciousness—a private view of a possible world. The creation of one such series, answering to one complete concept—i.e. the creation of one private view of a possible world—does not logically entail the creation of all the others which answer to the other complete concepts of the same set, nor does it entail the nonduplication of itself, nor the noncreation of other series answering to concepts belonging to different sets.” Strawson, Individuals, 130. 211 “Die bisherigen Erwägungen gingen darauf aus, eine Art erkenntniskritischer ‘Deduktion’, eine Begründung und Rechtfertigung des Begriffs der Repräsentation zu geben, sofern die Repräsentation, die Darstellung eines Inhalts in einem anderen und durch einen anderen, als eine wesentliche Voraussetzung für den Aufbau des Bewußtseins selbst und als Bedingung seiner eigenen Formeinheit erkannt werden sollte. Aber nicht auf diese allgemeinste logische Bedeutung der repräsentativen Funktion sind die folgenden Betrachtungen gerichtet. In ihnen soll das Problem des Zeichens nicht nach rückwärts in seine letzten ‘Gründe’, sondern nach vorwärts in die konkrete Entfaltung und Ausgestaltung, die es in der Mannigfaltigkeit der verschiedenen Kulturgebiete erfährt, verfolgt werden.” Cassirer, Philosophie der Symbolischen Formen, 39. 212 Cassirer, Philosophie der Symbolischen Formen, 30–31.

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Although an image of the world can rely on the sensus communis, that is, on what used to be called the image of thought and a natural way of thinking that disregards its origins in a presupposed concept of being, this position is criticized by Cassirer. For him, the metaphysics of being, in which content and form are thought together, are not possible if philosophy’s focus shifts towards consciousness.213 In a humanist vein, Cassirer advocates for the experience of manifoldness as the core of reality,214 and at the same time argues that consciousness is formed by every representation. Exactly at this point is where Tristram Shandy and Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften coincide. The partial truth distillated from a Gleichnis and the literary genres used as heuristic tools by Tristram are types of representations that configure a consciousness together with its image of the world. The fact that an illustration is not an argument, as Tristram would say, does not contradict the fact that every representation is the expression of a Grundform which develops its own truth concept.215 After this summary of Cassirer’s philosophy, we can pursue this chapter’s goal and argue that Tristram and Ulrich rely on thought patterns, albeit fictional, which can be considered as forms that set off from opposite extremes but reach similar conclusions. Their critical mindset pushes them to the brink of stagnation. However, they don’t seem to be indifferently following a path laid down in front of them by reflections and decisions. Both have a moral character that functions similarly to a symbolic form. The articulations of their mental activity depend on their personality, which is their unique point of view but deprived of a divine power to instantiate the world. To understand the origins of their ethos is to hear a biographical account that strives towards the “complete notion” that would describe these monadic individuals in their own terms. Overall, the narrative structure and stylistic devices in both novels serve to represent and show the workings of the fictional consciousness that prefigures the field of their story by constantly representing. In the following lines, I will elaborate the relationship between Essayismus, digressions, characters, point of view, and the representing consciousness and its forms.

|| 213 “Der Gegenstand läßt sich nicht als ein nacktes Ansich unabhängig von den wesentlichen Kategorien der Naturerkenntnis hinstellen, sondern nur in diesen Kategorien, die seine eigene Form erst konstituieren, zur Darstellung bringen.” Cassirer, Philosophie der Symbolischen Formen, 4. 214 “Der echte Begriff der Realität läßt sich nicht in die bloße abstrakte Seinsform hineinpressen, sondern er geht in die Mannigfaltigkeit und Fülle der Formen des geistigen Lebens auf – aber eines solchen Lebens, dem selbst das Gepräge der inneren Notwendigkeit und damit das Gepräge der Objektivität aufgedrückt ist.” Cassirer, Philosophie der Symbolischen Formen, 46. 215 Cassirer, Philosophie der Symbolischen Formen, 19.

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2.5.1 Ulrich’s analytical penchant The complex structures that obfuscate the center around which one could order the world result from the interaction between stylistic devices and compositional decisions that belong to a dialogue with the novel as a genre. Underneath this interaction, however, there is another layer whose analysis can shed new light on the topic of ordering the world. Ulrich and Tristram are depicted as engaging in mental activity that reproduces, to some degree, the characteristic movement of the essayistic and digressive novels. Their endeavor to orientate themselves in the world unfolds a panoramic view that never tries to hide the interstices in which the illusion of a central perspective vanishes. Despite their best intentions and efforts, their critical penchant leads them astray, and that is why Ulrich must stop the digression that leads him to the question of the Self. At that moment, he has to raise his head and scrutinize his surroundings pragmatically: “[N]un hatte er sich trotzdem dabei ein wenig vergangen und mußte einen Augenblick anhalten, um zu begreifen, wo er war, und den nächsten Weg nach Hause zu finden” (MoE 361). How Tristram and Ulrich proceed, as well as the final stage at which they arrive, might appear to be the same at first glance: they are plotting a labyrinth but cannot consider themselves its architects since they try to incorporate all opinions in their account, satisfy all tastes from their cultural surroundings. However, they adopt different positions to begin with. They posit a different attribute as the path that makes substance accessible. In Musil’s novel, god, the paragon of substance, is defined by attributelessness,216 whereas Stene’s novel follows Leon Battista Alberti and posits uniqueness as god’s attribute, because god is the only one that can possess all attrib|| 216 For Jochen Schmidt, the influence of the mystical tradition relates to the abstract, which for Kierkegaard represents, as previously argued, heteronomy: “Nach Eckeharts Grundansatz hat jeder Mensch ein letztes Substrat, einen ‘Grund’, in dem er der Gottheit wesensgleich ist. Gelangt der ‘Grund’ vollkommen zur Geltung, dann werden Mensch und Gott eins. Zur Verwirklichung dieser unio mystica aber bedarf es entschiedener Anstrengung, denn der Grund ist im Menschen verschüttet: begraben unter den vielen Schichten, die das Leben in der Welt gebildet hat. Die Schichten abzutragen, alle Bindungen und Fixierungen aufzulösen, ist Eckeharts große Forderung. Das mystische ‘Entwerden’ als den Hauptbegriff für dieses Abtragen und Auflösen hebt Ulrich in einem seiner Gespräche mit Agathe ausdrücklich hervor (MoE 753)“. Schmidt, Ohne Eigenschaften, 46. “Gott solle, so sagt Meister Eckehart, nicht mit den alten Kleidern der Attribute und Eigenschaften behängt, sondern in der namenlosen Wüste seiner Gottheit hingenommen werden – wörtlich: ‘ohne Eigenschaften’.” (48) According to Schmidt, for Meister Eckehart the highest form of being for a human is being without qualities, see also (52).

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utes.217 Attributelessness and uniqueness not only define the path that Ulrich and Tristram follow with their inquiries, but they can also be considered as their personality traits. Both characters partake to a lesser degree in god and exploit their respective divine principles to orientate their lives.218 Ulrich’s Urlaub vom Leben, his passive stance and his abstention from any choice or decision regarding his house and furniture might reveal the fundamental relation between the divine principle and his personality. But more revealing is the fact that these elements hint at the form adopted by his mental activity, that is, his penchant for dissecting any opinion, for analyzing its constitutive elements, and getting rid of all the accidents as an attempt to grasp a substratum that represents the core of his identity and the point of departure to becoming autonomous.219

|| 217 Leon Battista Alberti, Momus oder vom Fürsten. Momus seu de principe, ed. and trans. Michaela Boeneke (München: Fink, 1993), 3, 5, 15. The uniqueness is the cause and reason of perceiving a man of genius with amazement: “Von hier aus aber drängt sich uns die Einsicht geradezu auf, dass alles Seltene dadurch Anteil am Göttlichen hat, dass es danach strebt, für ein im höchsten Maße einzigartiges und von der Masse und Zahl der übrigen Dinge sich deutlich unterscheidendes Wesen zu gelten.” (5) 218 In her study on the Mystics and modernist literature, Wagner-Egelhaaf argues that the point in common are the reflexions between the form and the content that seek to convey the ineffable, reveal it with content but never enthroning such content. (Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf, Mystik der Moderne. Die visionäre Ästhetik der deutschen Literatur im 20. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1989), 2–4, 213) On the other hand, it is revealing for this investigation that the mystical tradition also discusses god as “unähnliche Ähnlichkeit”, or in other words, “Gott ist so sehr verschieden von allen menschlichen Begriffen und Vorstellungen, daß er nur über das Bewußtsein seiner Andersheit erfaßt werden kann.” (5) Even the perpetual motion that defines the novel’s discussion around immanence is a step in the unio mystica and not necessarily a quietude with god. (39–40) This step is what leads to a focus on difference as I have attempted in the last part and Wagner-Egelhaaf expresses thusly: “Die Produktionskraft des mystischen Prinzips der unähnlichen Ähnlichkeit läßt die Differenz als transzendenten Modus der Präsenz erscheinen.” (222) 219 Let us remember the name of Ulrich in earlier versions monsieur le vivisecteur. In this respect, Roth says: “Er viviseziert nicht allein intellektuelle Vorgänge oder seelische Reaktionen, sondern auch die geschichtliche Umwelt.” Roth, Robert Musil. Ethik und Ästhetik, 67. However, according to Roth Ulrich does not solely revels “in pessimistische ironische Abwertung,” but has a will to transform (70). Ulrich’s proclivity to dissect is interpreted thusly by Honold: “Der Urlaubswunsch enthält das Syntagma: ‘Leben zu nehmen’, eine Wendung, die wie das biblische Wort vom Bestellen des Hauses, eine Existenzgründung benennt – den Wunsch nach jener souveränen Verfügung über das eigene Leben, der in der Sprachordnung nur als Euphemismus für den Suizid zugelassen ist. Sich das Leben zu nehmen, bedeutet hier jedoch: überkommene Lebenszusammenhänge zu suspendieren, um in einem Akt der Neugründung sich der eigenen Existenz zu bemächtigen und unabhängig über sie zu entscheiden

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Ulrich’s analytic drive leads to the anderem Zustand, but it must not be interpreted exclusively from its mystic side. Ulrich is an enlightened scientist and is enmeshed in an epoch with a crisis that perhaps implicitly unearths a humanist discussion. He searches for identity’s basal foundations, but his motion simultaneously reveals an alternative concept. To orientate oneself without stopping undermines the central perspective and uncovers manifoldness in a manner that reminds us of Hans Blumenberg’s characterization of Bruno’s philosophy: Der Gedanke der im unendlichen Raum und in der unendlichen Zeit sich vollziehenden Metamorphose des homogenen Stoffes mußte Bruno faszinieren und hat seiner Konzeption von Einheit und Vielheit, von Identität des Weltprinzips der potentia absoluta und höchster Komplexion seiner Realisierung erst den adäquaten Ausdruck ermöglicht. Dennoch ist sein Formbegriff trotz dieser Annäherung an den Aristotelismus nicht der der orthodoxen forma substantialis der Scholastik, sondern der Inbegriff jener akzidentellen Bestimmungen, die durch die Ortsbewegung als den elementaren Faktor zu immer neuen Konstellationen gebracht werden.220

Ulrich’s flânerie through turn-of-the-century Vienna unfolds in a similar way. On the one hand, his walks give him the chance to free his mind from any practical constraints. When his body is occupied with strolling, his imagination and creativity can advance through their own conduits. In this manner, Ulrich can dismember any discourse and preconception. On the other hand, if one puts aside the broader scheme of Essayismus, then Ulrich’s mental activity seems to proceed with regularity; his thought patterns are tied to a form that does not respond to the idea of substance as undetermined. With Ulrich as reference point and exemplary figure, the novel reflects upon the unity of being and the implications of a shift of the ordering principle from being towards life. This double conception also exhibits the problems that Cassirer already identified. The first problem is assuming that the unity of being can lead to positing a substance that dissolves the diversity of space, time, and causality. A monolithic concept of being would move to dismiss every defining content because they would be accidental properties. Akrasia is the only condition that can ensue from a stringent concept of being. Conversely, the focus on the life concept, which results from a turn towards consciousness, might seem like a promise of immediacy, but only if one maintains the dualist ontology of being

|| (sich demnach auch ‘Urlaub’ von ihr gewähren zu können).” Honold, Die Stadt und der Krieg, 131. 220 Blumenberg, “Aspekte der Epochenschwelle”, 692.

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and thought and can conciliate them, perhaps by establishing the straight line of thought as correlated to the observable.221 Both positions are part of Ulrich’s personality. As a mathematician, he has the power of mathesis and can establish a systematic order of things. He possesses a method independent of its contents. This interpretation alludes to Walter’s opinion on Ulrich’s newly acquired attributelessness. For Walter, his friend’s attributelessness is related to a “lebendiges Formprinzip” and is also grounded in the fact that Ulrich’s character – or at least how people see him – depends on his profession: Ein Mathematiker sieht nach gar nichts aus; das heißt, er wird so allgemein intelligent aussehen, daß es keinen einzigen bestimmten Inhalt hat! Mit Ausnahme der römischkatholischen Geistlichen sieht heute überhaupt niemand mehr so aus, wie er sollte, weil wir unseren Kopf noch unpersönlicher gebrauchen als unsere Hände; aber Mathematik, das ist der Gipfel […]. (MoE 64)

Walter reinforces, perhaps unintentionally, the idea that Ulrich is a man without qualities, which means that his mental endeavors probably observe the procedural rules dictated by a form which, in its realization, produces an image or representation.222 This form can be potentially applied to depicting any content. Besides this potential, Ulrich is also endowed with a mutability that opens further possibilities. To conclude his appraisal, Walter says: Nichts ist für ihn fest. Alles ist verwandlungsfähig, Teil in einem Ganzen, in unzähligen Ganzen, die vermutlich zu einem Überganzen gehören, das er aber nicht im geringsten kennt. So ist jede seiner Antworten eine Teilantwort, jedes seiner Gefühle nur eine Ansicht, und es kommt ihm bei nichts darauf an, was es ist, sondern nur auf irgendein danebenlaufendes ‘wie es ist’, irgendeine Zutat, kommt es ihm immer an. (MoE 65)

Ulrich’s profession trained him to systematize the world and endow it with cohesion and homogeneity. However, apart from revealing this method’s potential, Walter’s opinion also raises the suspicion that a myriad of forms could

|| 221 Cassirer, Philosophie der Symbolischen Formen, 46–27. 222 “Aber auch abgesehen von dieser Besonderung führt schon die allgemeinste Betrachtung des Bewußtseinsganzen auf gewisse grundlegende Einheitsbedingungen, auf Bedingungen der Verknüpfbarkeit, der geistigen Zusammenfassung und der geistigen Darstellung überhaupt, zurück. Es gehört zum Wesen des Bewußtseins selbst, daß in ihm kein Inhalt gesetzt werden kann, ohne daß schon, eben durch diesen einfachen Akt der Setzung, ein Gesamtkomplex anderer Inhalte mitgesetzt wird.” Cassirer, Philosophie der Symbolischen Formen, 29.

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bring further aspects of the world to light. Each form represents a piece of a puzzle, but there is no possibility of obtaining a final description with all the pieces since they show how the world is, but could never raise a claim on what the world is. This panoply of descriptive modes becomes problematic when one tries to approach the Self and find a balance between a common denominator and the accidents and circumstances defining this Self. On this respect, Clarisse advances an abridged variation on protean people: “Wenn man das Wesen von tausend Menschen zerlegt, so stößt man auf zwei Dutzend Eigenschaften, Empfindungen, Ablaufarten, Aufbauformen und so weiter, aus denen sie alle bestehn. Und wenn man unseren Leib zerlegt, so findet man nur Wasser und einige Dutzend Stoffhäufchen, die darauf herumschwimmen” (MoE 66). Reducing phenomena or people to their common traits is, in this context, an argument that explains the lack of a stable order and how the same material foundation can lead to all kinds of lives. Although the various descriptive modes cast doubt on any assertion and establish a skeptical position, the reduction can be also embraced as the imperfect starting point, a working image that can be analyzed and dissected to discover what somebody could do with the pieces. This reductive definition represents the fundament from which one can set off in the continuous effort to become oneself. Defining the innermost determinations is related to Ulrich’s quest to find out what is in his hands and can be manipulated and transformed. A chemical formula expresses, hence, the potential related to a symbolic order, as well as its limits. This, somewhat contradictory, interpretation of a chemical formula like H₂O is explained by Cassirer thusly: [Die Formel] bezeichnet den Körper nicht mehr nach dem, was er sinnlich “ist” und als was er sich uns unmittelbar sinnlich gibt, sondern sie faßt ihn als einen Inbegriff möglicher “Reaktionen”, möglicher kausaler Zusammenhänge, die durch allgemeine Regel bestimmt werden. Die Gesamtheit dieser gesetzlichen Verknüpfungen ist es, die in der chemischen Konstitutionsformel mit dem Ausdruck des Einzelnen verschmilzt und durch die nun dieser Ausdruck ein durchaus neues charakteristisches Gepräge erhält.223

A formula might at first reduce the complexity of a phenomenon by plucking it from its context and ratifying, in this manner, the tendency to overlook different circumstances or approaches. But the loss of a direct link between perception and perceived object is turned into a finite knowledge dependent on forms. Objects are extruded through a form and despite being forced into an asphyxiating cast, the end product has a certain potential.

|| 223 Cassirer, Philosophie der Symbolischen Formen, 43.

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From this perspective, Ulrich’s constant dissecting is defined by the natural sciences and inductive thinking, but it stands for a movement towards the core of an individual, which is comparable to the mystic’s Entwerdung. Ulrich wishes to become a tabula rasa, to find the core around which his potential could be developed. This double movement implies a contradiction or, better yet, a complex discussion in which Musil seems to be drawing from two different conceptions. While the mystical experience posits a core that partakes of the divine substance and touches upon many issues regarding the world’s intelligibility, the motif of poietic potential together with the unrestrained imagination of a possibilitarian, undermine the idea of a substantial core. This contradiction can be assuaged, however, and the two positions can be brought into harmony if the core is defined as a contentless poietic one that can never actualize all the possibilities in sight. This kind of core is comparable to Blumenberg’s interpretation of Bruno’s De la causa, principio et uno.224 In Bruno’s philosophy, an individual’s potential is defined by the concrete basis in which he is enmeshed and the secularization process steers him away from the infinite as guiding principle and from an eidetic definition of the self. In their novels, Sterne and Musil are dealing with the experience of contingency, which motivates Ulrich to focus on the role of dissecting a Self as well as on this Self’s creative powers.225 Contingency is what disarms Walter’s counterargument: “Aber Menschen […] tun das seit zehntausend Jahren, starren den Himmel an, spüren die Erdwärme und zerlegen das so wenig wie man seine Mutter zerlegt!” (MoE 66) Without an order that goes from high above to earth’s incandescent core, or in other words, without a transcendental divine order or chthonic instantiations, the only option available for Ulrich is to legitimate his || 224 “Nun widerspricht aber dieser deduktiven Präsumption das Kontingenzbewußtsein, das der Mensch von sich selbst und von der Welt hat, sein Erleiden der Endlichkeit an der Präsenz der Idee der Unendlichkeit. Es ist seine bohrende Selbsterfahrung, daß er zwar ist, was er sein kann, aber nicht alles ist, was sein kann, zwar die Verwirklichung seines Eidos, aber zugleich damit die Ausschließung von jeder anderen eidetischen Bestimmbarkeit. Hier sperrt die endliche Zeit das individuelle Dasein von der Abundanz der Möglichkeiten aus, weil sie das konkrete Wesen in den Grenzen seiner Spezifität eingeschlossen hält und ihm nur ein Werden und Vergehen innerhalb dieser Kontur läßt.” Blumenberg, “Aspekte der Epochenschwelle”, 667. 225 Blumenberg explains Bruno’s time conception in the following terms: “Die Zeit selbst wird vielmehr zur realen Dimension der stetigen, aber in jedem ihrer Augenblicke gleichwertigen Selbstreproduktion Gottes.” Blumenberg, “Aspekte der Epochenschwelle”, 666. “Die Zeit als unendliche Dimension reißt diese Grenze auf. Wenn in ihr die Totalität der Möglichkeiten durchgespielt werden kann, gibt es nicht das Sichabfinden mit der Kontingenz des Einmaligen, jetzt Daseienden, gibt es vielmehr das Eingehen des Substrats in den großen Variationsprozeß, in die immerwährende Metamorphose, als die ‘Natur’ hier zu begreifen ist.” (668)

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decisions through an analytical procedure. He can no longer look at the sky for answers. Furthermore, Ulrich seems to overhear Walter’s admonitions and can be said to dissect his own mother, to whom there is a key allusion in the novel, throughout the text. In a conversation that might reveal who Ulrich’s mother is, the reader hears the protagonist refusing to be productive, to write down his experience in the world: “Was haben Sie mir nicht schon alles erzählt!” erwiderte Gerda darauf finster. “Warum schreiben Sie nicht ein Buch über Ihre Anschauungen, Sie könnten vielleicht sich und uns damit helfen.” “Aber wie komme ich denn dazu, ein Buch schreiben zu müssen?!” meinte Ulrich. “Mich hat doch eine Mutter geboren und kein Tintenfaß!” (MoE 490)

Ulrich is consistent and persists in his passivity. However, let us remember that his active passivism is nourished by the possibilities and new paths opening in front of him every time he disarticulates the discourses that stand in his way. One could speculate whether his mother is an inkwell or not, but the truth is that he is constantly engaged in the bearings that traditional stylistic devices and narrative forms have on a life’s journey.226 If she were an inkwell, she would be kin to the bottomless inkwell that has deposited Tristram in an endless journey to tell his story. The burden imposed by contingent times is, hence, not only to search for possibilities by dismantling an event’s mechanics, but also its

|| 226 Eisele argues, in a paper developed around this fragment, that Ulrich’s refusal to write or his impossibility to write down his own life results from the contraposition of life and literature: “Das heißt, was immer in diesem Text geschieht und gesagt wird, ist gefiltert durch eine ganz bestimmte Vorstellung des Literarischen und nicht richtig zu verstehen ohne die damit verbundene Problematik.” Ulf Eisele “Ulrichs Mutter ist doch ein Tintenfass. Zur Literaturproblematik in Musils ‘Mann ohne Eigenschaften’”, in Robert Musil, ed. by R. v. Heydebrand, 160– 208 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1982), 161. Eisele’s reading supports the arguments presented here, since it also considers the inquiry after an autonomous way to endow the world with sense and its poetics as a central topic of the novel (160–162). Therein resides Ulrich’s passive folly “Statt sich in ihr [der Realität] handelnd zu bewegen – dies würde die Anerkennung wenigstens einer partiellen Sinnimmanenz bedeuten –, ist sein Verhältnis zur Wirklichkeit das eines distanzierten und reflektierenden Beobachters.” (167) Within this framework, rationality could be said to be derived from this point: “Die Literatur als solche wird zum Telos eines präheldischen Protagonisten, da sie – und nur sie – ihrem (vom Text unterstellten) Begriff nach wirkliche Identität und damit die ‘Möglichkeit’ eines ‘ganzen’ Lebens (1216) zu garantieren vermag.” (190) For this reason, the interpretation in the first part of this investigation holds: “Der Literatur wird als Verpflichtung auferlegt” (193).

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presentation modes, which can never regain what was lost with the epic. This chasm leaves individuals swimming everywhere but in water: Clarisse mußte wieder kichern. “Er sagt, das hat sich seither sehr verwickelt. So wie wir auf dem Wasser schwimmen, schwimmen wir auch in einem Meer von Feuer, einem Sturm von Elektrizität, einem Himmel von Magnetismus, einem Sumpf von Wärme und so weiter. Alles aber unfühlbar. Zum Schluß bleiben überhaupt nur Formeln übrig. Und was die menschlich bedeuten, kann man nicht recht ausdrücken; das ist das Ganze. […]” (MoE 66)

From an uncritical submission to form ensues an inconsistency in which our actions are unrelated to the circumstances. We move legs and arms exactly in the same manner, even though we constantly traverse environments with different properties and density. If a word like swimming can be used metaphorically, after a while it becomes an abstract form that starts losing its productive potential to represent the world or a function that alludes to a single framework. However, it may be the case that a concept narrows down what can be considered swimming, maybe because swimming has become infatuated with the technique, that is, with the idea that a certain stroke is perfect and must be repeated without heeding the circumstances nor the difference that repetition entails. To swim in a sense that escapes conceptual constraints entails the awareness of a specific environment, a stream whose ripples become meaningful objects to which the swimmer should be responsive.227 || 227 The repetition is one of the main topics in the last part of this project and this example represents perhaps a lucky coincidence. Deleuze uses swimming to shed some light on two sides of a repetition and their relation to a general concept: “L’apprentissage ne se fait pas dans le rapport de la représentation à l’action (comme reproduction du Même), mais dans le rapport du signe à la réponse (comme rencontre avec l’Autre). De trois manières au moins, le signe comprend l’hétérogénéité: d’abord dans l’objet qui le porte ou qui l’émet, et qui présente nécessairement une différence de niveau, comme deux ordres de grandeur ou de réalité disparates entre lesquels le signe fulgure; d’autre part en lui-même, parce que le signe enveloppe un autre ‘objet’ dans les limites de l’objet porteur, et incarne une puissance de la nature ou de l’esprit (Idée) ; enfin dans la réponse qu’il sollicite, le mouvement de la réponse ne ‘ressemblant’ pas à celui du signe. Le mouvement du nageur ne ressemble pas au mouvement de la vague ; et précisément, les mouvements du maître-nageur que nous reproduisons sur le sable ne sont rien par rapport aux mouvements de la vague que nous n’apprenons à parer qu’en les saisissant pratiquement comme des signes. […] Quand le corps conjugue de ses points remarquables avec ceux de la vague, il noue le principe d’une répétition qui n’est plus celle du Même, mais qui comprend l’Autre, qui comprend la différence, d’une vague et d’un geste à l’autre, et qui transporte cette différence dans l’espace répétitif ainsi constitué. […] Nous sommes en droit de parler de répétition, quand nous nous trouvons devant des éléments identiques ayant absolument le même concept. Mais de ces éléments discrets, de ces objets répétés,

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Perhaps this is how Musil conveys the Nietzschean and Spinozean idea that to take control over our life is to take control over the signs and forms we use to narrate or lead it. One inconvenience, however, is that, in Ulrich’s world, forms can coexist and are so variegated that one might not find the appropriate form for the concrete circumstances. So if Tristram and Ulrich do not undertake the task to manipulate and work with forms, they will surely lose their compass, or better said, won’t be able to orientate themselves in their volatile worlds in the slightest. Their troubles thus do not only reside in finding a substratum or a transcendental view to orientate themselves in the world, but in grappling with tradition, in their impossibility to find two individuals with the same opinion about water, about the constitutive element with which the protean people destroy and create anew the world in their own image. There is a variety of forms – grounded in circumstances or rooted in a plural tradition – which adds a further layer of complexity to the problem that ensues when we walk. Perhaps we walk with a goal in mind, but to take the next step we must free one of our feet by putting our weight on the other and pushing it into the ground. This commitment to a pivotal point is a movement that allows us to accumulate the relics of learning that help build any idea: Alles das nimmt nun, mehr oder weniger bewußt, ein junger Mensch in den Lehrsälen des Wissens in sich auf, und er lernt dazu die Elemente einer großen konstruktiven Gesinnung kennen, die das Entfernte wie einen fallenden Stein und einen kreisenden Stern spielend zusammenbringt und etwas, das scheinbar eins und unteilig ist, wie das Entstehen einer einfachen Handlung aus den Zentren des Bewußtseins, in Ströme zerlegt, deren innere Quellen um Jahrtausende voneinander verschieden sind. (MoE 304–305)

Assuming this characterization of a young person applies to Ulrich, his analytic grip on things can discover how a mind conjoins the smallest and the biggest objects in the world. Stones and stars are not only part of the same order, but so similar that they are separated by the slight twirling of an “i”, which in an instant takes us from Stein to Stern, from a conception based on gravity as a universal law to the multipolar cosmos with its innumerable stars and entities, which have their own gravity center and gravitational pull. In the eyes of this analytical judge, even the simplest action originating in a conscious decision

|| nous devons distinguer un sujet secret qui se répète à travers eux, véritable sujet de la répétition. Il faut penser la répétition au pronominal, trouver le Soi de la répétition, la singularité dans ce qui se répète.” Gilles Deleuze, Différence et répétition (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1968), 35.

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amalgamates the most dissimilar elements, the most diverse discourses, weighed and balanced to overcome the plurality of tradition and take the next step.228 Although the mystical experience might represent a step, its relation to Ulrich’s dismantling personality leads to a problem we have already discussed: So ist der Geist der Jenachdem-Macher, aber er selbst ist nirgends zu fassen, und fast könnte man glauben, daß von seiner Wirkung nichts als Zerfall übrigbleibe. Jeder Fortschritt ist ein Gewinn im Einzelnen und eine Trennung im Ganzen; es ist das ein Zuwachs an Macht, der in einen fortschreitenden Zuwachs an Ohnmacht mündet, und man kann nicht davon lassen. Ulrich fühlte sich an diesen fast stündlich wachsenden Leib von Tatsachen und Entdeckungen erinnert, aus dem der Geist heute herausblicken muß, wenn er irgendeine Frage genau betrachten will. (MoE 154)

Ulrich’s analytic drive confronts him with the same complications that trouble the Parallel Campaign. Translated into Ulrich’s terms and life, his reflections nourish his obsession and reaffirm his analytical penchant, but, at the same time, they erase the outlines of systematized knowledge and grow into Ohnmacht. He does not seem to be interested in constructing a whole with the parts he gains through his dissections.229 Instead, his mental activity produces an abstraction related to the mystical tradition. Abstraction, in the mystical sense, dissolves the distinct images of the world and allows us to linger in indeterminateness, in a horizon of possibilities, there-

|| 228 Here is a further comparison point with the humanist thought: “Bruno und Nikolaus gemeinsam ist der platonisierende, ja bei Bruno bis auf Parmenides zurückgreifende Versuch, das Problem von Einheit und Vielheit, der Einheit in der Vielfalt, nicht nur metaphysisch und kosmologisch aufzugreifen, sondern es auf die Bewältigung des Pluralismus der Tradition anzuwenden. Der Ausbruch aus der erzwungenen, auf die Ebene des Aristotelismus nivellierenden Einheitsform der Scholastik bedeutete für den Cusaner, daß noch die verrufenen Namen eines Protagoras und eines Epikur ihren Anteil am komplexen Wesen der Wahrheit haben konnten. Sogar die Vielheit der Religionen konnte in eine fast perspektivistische Konkordanz gebracht werden.” Blumenberg, “Aspekte der Epochenschwelle”, 652. 229 This situation is depicted by Cassirer as a possible scenario with different Being principles in conflict. “Die einzelnen geistigen Richtungen treten nicht, um einander zu ergänzen, friedlich nebeneinander, sondern jede wird zu dem, was sie ist, erst dadurch, daß sie gegen die anderen und im Kampf mit den anderen die ihr eigentümliche Kraft erweist.” Cassirer, Philosophie der Symbolischen Formen, 11. “Je mehr sie sich in die abstrakte Allgemeinheit dieses Prinzips einschließen, um so mehr schließen sie sich damit gegen einzelne Seiten der geistigen Kultur und gegen die konkrete Totalität ihrer Formen ab.” (12)

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by assuaging the inconsistencies of the experience of the modern world.230 The difference between an object and a subject, between an idea and reality, dissolve into an indeterminate unity. By resorting to the mystical tradition, Musil revitalizes a medieval problematic and solution that became popular after the rise of scholastic thought, and translates it into modernity’s terms. He contends with a knowledge systematization grounded in a monolithic principle. Whether it is god or Reason, deriving a system therefrom overlooks the irrational, as well as explanations that take the constitutive power of living experience as their basis.231 This focus on the diverse provokes a paradigm shift leading to an alternative discussion. Side by side, the novel develops a discussion that resorts both to the mystical tradition and to an immanent conception that defines gravity and, consequently, the next step. To shed some light on this conception, one can resort to Bruno’s cosmology and metaphysics, grounded in the Copernican turn,232 and to the narrator’s opinion about:

|| 230 The abstraction process might stagnate because it does not choose an image, but it lingers in potency and the absolute. Schmidt, Ohne Eigenschaften, 80. “Musils entschiedene Sympathie mit der Moderne gilt dem Abstrakten. Abstraktion ist eine Folge des Wirklichkeitszerfalls. Denn Wirklichkeitszerfall führt durch Auflösung aller individuellen Gestalt in die Abstraktion. Abstraktion ist aber auch die letzte Konsequenz des radikalen Anspruchs auf die Geltung des Inneren, Konsequenz der großen mystischen Loslösung von der äußeren Erscheinungswelt. Mystische Wendung und Abstraktion gehören also wesentlich zusammen. Abstrakte Kunst ist die formale Entsprechung zu dem Programm eines Mannes ohne Eigenschaften. […] Denn die Vernichtung bestehender Wirklichkeit öffnet den Horizont neuer Möglichkeit, und wo prinzipiell alle Wirklichkeit untergeht, ereignet sich der beunruhigende Überfall alles nur Möglichen – auch des scheinbar Unmöglichsten.” (70) The unsolvable problem and chasm between character and world is the moment of indeterminacy. Perhaps it is just an abstraction that makes it possible to adopt any mode of the possible, “aber diese Möglichkeiten sind nicht Angstträume, sondern Freiheitsträume. Deren Rettung erfordert allerdings, daß der Möglichkeitsmodus grundsätzlich aufrechterhalten bleibt. In keinem Augenblick darf aus der durch Wirklichkeitszerfall entstandenen Möglichkeitsfülle eine bestimmte neue Realität entspringen.” (71) For inner form, see 88. 231 “Historisch gesehen ist dies die Gegenbewegung gegen die von Aristoteles hergeleitete begriffliche Definitionskunst und den Systembau der Scholastik, eine Reaktion also auf grenzen- und gehäuseschaffendes Denken unter Berufung auf ursprüngliches Erleben. […] Musil gehört als eine der nachdenklichsten Gestalten in diese dem blanken Irrationalismus oft sich nähernde Bewegung, die sich zerstörend und auflösend gegen eine selbstgenügsame, abgeschlossene und in einer Fülle von Rationalisierungen erstarrte Welt wendet.” Schmidt, Ohne Eigenschaften, 63. 232 Blumenberg, “Aspekte der Epochenschwelle”, 556.

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Der große Galileo Galilei, der dabei immer als erster genannt wird, räumte zum Beispiel mit der Frage auf, aus welchem in ihrem Wesen liegenden Grund die Natur eine Scheu vor leeren Räumen habe, sodaß sie einen fallenden Körper solange Raum um Raum durchdringen und ausfüllen lasse, bis er endlich auf festem Boden anlange, und begnügte sich mit einer viel gemeineren Feststellung: er ergründete einfach, wie schnell ein solcher Körper fällt, welche Wege er zurücklegt, Zeiten verbraucht und welche Geschwindigkeitszuwüchse er erfährt. Die katholische Kirche hat einen schweren Fehler begangen, indem sie diesen Mann mit dem Tode bedrohte und zum Widerruf zwang, statt ihn ohne viel Federlesens umzubringen […]. (Moe 302)

Without Galileo, Ulrich would never had lived in a world rife with functions and short on fixed points from which to orientate himself. This is a consequence of the dangers, implicit in his answer, that Galileo’s doctrine represented for the church. The Italian astronomer did not inquire after the reason behind an entity’s disposition to perpetual movement in a frictionless world nor did he speculate on the direction in which this internal principle might take an object. His investigation was grounded in Copernicus’s findings and undermined the scholastic view of god as the Aristotelian unmoved mover, thus dynamiting the orientation from high to low and its value scale.233 The vertical axis became superfluous. Movement was thought to hinge on a gravitational push that could be described as a law independent of any order. Space can be theoretically regarded as a vacuum lacking coordinates, so the only characteristic defining an object in this emptiness is its own ability to move endlessly in an arbitrary direction. There is no order implied in this account, and even the reason or first cause is out of the picture. Explanations can be advanced without the need to support them in the scholastic framework, and movement has no external cause; it is, rather, an entity’s potential. Although Ulrich bids farewell to a stable world order, that is, to his cavalry days, and comes to terms with the fact that he lives in a secular world rife with functions, he is still looking for a foundation or a fixed point undaunted by the infinite space in which gravity’s direction and its meaning are both prone to change: Ulrich fühlte sich an diesen fast stündlich wachsenden Leib von Tatsachen und Entdeckungen erinnert, aus dem der Geist heute herausblicken muß, wenn er irgendeine Frage genau betrachten will. Dieser Körper wächst dem Inneren davon. Unzählige Auffassungen, Meinungen, ordnende Gedanken aller Zonen und Zeiten, aller Formen gesunder und

|| 233 Blumenberg, “Aspekte der Epochenschwelle”, 676.

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kranker, wacher und träumender Hirne durchziehen ihn zwar wie Tausende kleiner empfindlicher Nervenstränge, aber der Strahlpunkt, wo sie sich vereinen, fehlt. (MoE 154 emphasis mine)

Without a unified spatial framework in which objects would always fall in the same direction, there is need for a cardinal point flexible enough to allow for the reinvention of the world and the discovery of how objects fall in the direction that circumstances demand.234 Attributlessness offers a foundation comparable to the unmovable mover. It leads to absolute potency but renounces any stable ground for the manipulation of the world. In a more limited manner, moral character as a form represents an alternative way of positing a measure and regularity that serves as axis to find one’s place in the world and palliate the feeling of being adrift.235 This form can function as a vortex modelled by the circumstances, one that swallows them to produce provisional images. A form provides an intangible “Griff, den man vielleicht packen könnte, den eigentlichen Geist des Geistes, das fehlende, vielleicht nur kleine Stück, das den zerbrochenen Kreis schließt” (MoE 155). Character as form can assume the role of the unmoved mover as measure thanks to its regularity, but only if a personality’s peculiarities are identified and its unique pace assessed. If one takes into account the concrete circumstances and how the character was formed, one can posit a principle governing

|| 234 “In der Begründung dieser These wiederholt Bruno das aristotelische Gedankenexperiment des Platztausches von Erde und Mond, und zwar mit durchaus entgegengesetztem Ergebnis: Während Aristoteles annahm, dass dabei weiterhin alle schweren (d. h. ‘erdigen’) Gegenstände in der bisherigen Richtung – also auf ihren natürlichen Ort zu – fallen würden, unabhängig davon, ob dort noch der Erdkörper sich befände, folgert Bruno, dass dann alle dem Erdkörper zugehörigen Teile sich auch in Richtung seines neuen Standortes bewegen, also nicht mehr ‘fallen’, sondern ‘nach oben steigen’ würden. Und daraufhin wird ausdrücklich gesagt, daß die Teile eines Weltkörpers ebensowenig die Tendenz haben könnten, sich einem Weltkörper zu inkorporieren, wie es bei den Teilen eines Lebewesens der Fall wäre.” Blumenberg, “Aspekte der Epochenschwelle”, 678–679. 235 The role of the unmovable mover: “Wie Plato sich auf die Verbindlichkeit der idealen Rationalität für den Demiurgen im Timaios berufen hatte, so leitete Aristoteles die notwendige absolute Regularität der Kreisbewegung des Fixsternhimmels aus der logischen Analyse des Zeitbegriffs ab, der eine kosmische Bewegung als letztes Maß erforderte, das nicht wieder an einer übergreifenden Maßstäblichkeit gemessen werden konnte, wobei sein unbewegter Beweger der garantierende Faktor dieser unüberbietbaren Gleichmäßigkeit zu sein hatte; dadurch konnte es eine kosmische Universalzeit geben als Maß einer Bewegung, die ihrerseits alle anderen innerkosmischen Bewegungen zeitlich zu messen ermöglichte.” Blumenberg, “Aspekte der Epochenschwelle”, 682, emphasis mine.

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all the motions and actions,236 a movement that, in an ideal case, will follow its own direction in a straight line, which attains a new meaning close to Bruno’s: “Geradlinige Bewegungen bleiben auch bei Bruno trotz der Unendlichkeit seines Weltraumes prinzipiell endliche Bewegungen, die sich immer ‘in der Nähe’ der Bezugskörper abspielen und als Korrekturen von Irregularitäten aufgefasst werden müssen, die aus der Heftigkeit der innerkörperlichen organischen Prozesse entstehen können.”237 However, both the individual straight line and the spirit des JenachdemMachers, which seeks to conciliate all elements and posit a whole, could never arrive at a last stage of perfection and idleness. Fixations are provisional. These mutations can only be assimilated by the act of representation: “Er haßt heimlich wie den Tod alles, was so tut, als stünde es ein für allemal fest, die großen Ideale und Gesetze und ihren kleinen versteinten Abdruck, den gefriedeten Charakter. Er hält kein Ding für fest, kein Ich, keine Ordnung; weil unsre Kenntnisse sich mit jedem Tag ändern können, glaubt er an keine Bindung, und alles besitzt den Wert, den es hat, nur bis zum nächsten Akt der Schöpfung, wie ein Gesicht, zu dem man spricht, während es sich mit den Worten verändert” (MoE 154). The process of representation asks, following Cassirer, how consciousness is constructed, and knowledge actualized. Ulrich’s mental activity produces representations incessantly and his lack of control over them, or rather his will to let his mind wander free, hint at a malleable consciousness that can be controlled through psycho-techniques or posited, in a humanist vein, as immanent principle of intelligibility. It is not so much a matter of defining which are the constitutive elements of an object, but of asking how the diverse sides of an object form a whole. This ‘How did it happen?’ encourages us to delve into the circumstances instead of reducing everything to ‘what happened’. The “how” that Tristram tries to depict represents also the “wie” implied in the Gleichnis. In German, “wie” can function as an interrogative adverb or a conjunction introducing a comparison, so Jörg Kühne claims the “wie” stands for a further aesthetic principle: “Die Relationen verleihen den Erscheinungen Bedeutung, und vor der Erkenntnis der wah|| 236 “Die kopernikanische Destruktion der Realität des ersten Himmels und der ersten Bewegung schließt auch den ersten unbewegten Beweger des Aristoteles und den kosmologischen Gottesbeweis der Scholastik sowie die davon abhängige Annahme nachgeordneter Sphären und Sphärenbeweger aus. Alle Weltkörper haben als Lebewesen ihr Bewegungsprinzip in sich selbst, durch das sie jene komplexen kreisenden Bewegungen vollziehen, in denen sie zur optimalen Ausschöpfung der universalen Partizipation geführt werden.” Blumenberg, “Aspekte der Epochenschwelle”, 686. 237 Blumenberg, “Aspekte der Epochenschwelle”, 679.

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ren Bedeutung der Erscheinungen ist die Mannigfaltigkeit der möglichen Strukturen aller Erfahrung und Darstellung gesetzt.”238 The “wie” opens a path that can lead to inquiries about the form in which one posits the relationships between objects. Moreover, the “how” can become a bridge towards the question of totality, that is, the “wie” leads to the abstraction encompassing all possible forms.239 For Kühne, the figure of the Gleichnis represents the possibility of attaining a totality that can be construed as the one engrained in the Moosbrugger complex and mystical experience. However, this path belongs to a conception that is at odds with the alternative, grounded in an immanent conception that relinquishes speculation of a transcendental view. For this reason, let us keep our panoply of forms and the impossibility of merging them into a cohesive order.

2.5.2 Tristram’s retentive Lebenswelt Tristram as narrator and architect of his own life channels his writing endeavors in the opposite direction, but with the same goal in mind. He reaches similar conclusions to Ulrich, but prefers an accumulative procedure that unfolds a Lebenswelt before the reader’s eyes. The motor of this ever-encroaching digressive style revolves around the “how”: “I have just been able, and that’s all, to tell you when it happen’d, but not how;—so that you see the thing is yet far from being accomplished” (I, xiv, 42). Just to recapitulate what has been stated repeatedly throughout this investigation, the “how”, for Tristram, stands for the concrete boundaries between Self and world. The Self is revealed through these boundaries’ constant mediation, one that takes place in the past, since this is a written account. Additionally, the Self is enriched by the negotiation with tradition, which constitutes a dialogue that a narrator never starts nor ends, defined by interruptions. In the present moment in which the narrator is reconstructing the events in his life by resorting to all available resources, he is picking up vestiges handed down to him and discussions that neither began nor will conclude with him. This double movement, oscillating between diverse pasts and presents, is meant to delineate and shape a world, as well as to trace its coordinates and establish its relative position to an infinite space beyond its boundaries. Tristram’s goal is to orientate himself: “But need I tell you, Sir, that the circum|| 238 Kühne, Das Gleichnis, 79. 239 Kühne, Das Gleichnis, 78–79. For the Gleichnis as bridge, see 86.

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stances with which every thing in this world is begirt, give every thing in this world its size and shape!—and by tightening it, or relaxing it, this way or that, make the thing to be, what it is—great—little—good—bad—indifferent or not indifferent, just as the case happens?” (III, ii, 187). Contrary to the inquiry after the Self’s foundation, in Tristram Shandy, the Self cannot be thought without the world in which it is embedded. And even if an indeterminate foundation were to be found, it cannot be related to a word or noun; the ascription of a feature to a proper name would bring the whole project to its knees. In Tristram’s world, a proper noun cannot stand for itself even when is part of a fiction, or at least, this is one of Toby Shandy’s many criticisms to corporal Trim’s story-telling: The King of Bohemia, an’ please your honour, replied the corporal, was unfortunate, as thus——That taking great pleasure and delight in navigation and all sort of sea affairs—— and there happening throughout the whole kingdom of Bohemia, to be no seaport town whatever—— How the duce should there—Trim? cried my uncle Toby; for Bohemia being totally inland, it could have happen’d no otherwise——It might, said Trim, if it had pleased God—— My uncle Toby never spoke of the being and natural attributes of God, but with diffidence and hesitation—— ——I believe not, replied my uncle Toby, after some pause——for being inland, as I said, and having Silesia and Moravia to the east; Lusatia and Upper Saxony to the north; Franconia to the west; Bavaria to the south; Bohemia could not have been propell’d to the sea without ceasing to be Bohemia——nor could the sea, on the other hand, have come up to Bohemia, without overflowing a great part of Germany, and destroying millions of unfortunate inhabitants who could make no defence against it. ——Scandalous! cried Trim— Which would bespeak, added my uncle Toby, mildly, such a want of compassion in him who is the father of it——that, I think, Trim——the thing could have happen’d no way. The corporal made the bow of unfeigned conviction; and went on. Now the King of Bohemia with his queen and courtiers happening one fine summer’s evening to walk out——Aye! there the word happening is right, Trim, cried my uncle Toby; for the King of Bohemia and his queen might have walk’d out or let it alone:——’twas a matter of contingency, which might happen, or not, just as chance ordered it. (VIII, xix, 992–993)

As a pious man of feeling, Toby would never dare raise a claim on god’s attributes. For him, God’s limitless goodness cannot be articulated through words but only through Sentiment. Despite the misunderstanding between characters, gestures convey that none of them meant ill to one another.240 The Shandy clan || 240 For Michael Gassenmeier, Uncle Toby embodies goodwill, in a Shaftesburyan sense, and the immediate emotional link with fellow humans. However, his good nature leads him to misjudge the true intentions of people surrounding him and misinterpret every opinion. He

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is essentially good-natured, but the way in which they understand the world cannot be grounded in the idea that events and the order of things are god’s manifestations. Such topics are beyond the novel’s scope and are treated as the insuperable marble page, as issues that the novel, as a secular task, decides not to discuss. On these grounds, Toby embraces contingency and his ironic condition, so he must mourn twice over any historical event, all the wars and destruction that led to the present: “—‘It was a thousand pities, an’ please your honour, to destroy these works——and a thousand pities to have let them stood.’—— ” (VIII, xix, 681). For Toby, contingency defines how one orientates oneself. Consequently, our wishes regarding geography should comply with that same criterion. Toby’s objection is unrelated to a proper noun and its referential function. Rather, it thematizes the sedimentation that even a proper noun has in language. If the Bohemian King’s wishes were fulfilled and his land had a coastline for him to indulge in navigation, his land would stop being the same land. If it had a seaport, it could not have the same name, according to Toby, nor would the king be the same King of Bohemia. To wish for a seaport in Bohemia is nonsensical, for Toby. The king is unfortunate due to something that is not in his hands and can only be brought about by divine powers. Perhaps Toby could accept somebody wishing for another land, but that land would not be Bohemia. If Tristram were a kingdom like Bohemia, he would not be an insular nation divided from the rest of the world by the qualitative difference of an ultimate foundation. Instead, he is part of a Pangea and must explore geographical, literary, philosophical, and familiar boundaries by sending emissaries in all directions to expand, if not his domain over the world, at least his knowledge of it. Instead of striving for an indeterminate core, Tristram’s character as a writer, or, in other words, the form governing his narrative impetus, achieves overdetermination. In contrast to Ulrich, who decants the liquid contents of the protean man as a means to recover and pinpoint the power that allows it to sediment, Tristram’s character represents a form that overflows its own banks and, contrary to his goals, does not deliver an accurate assessment of its borders, but blurs them. Tristram is the indeterminate core from which a world is constructed. If this core was provided with a perpetual motion machine, its manner of as-

|| represents the good beyond finite reason and establishes an ironic condition defined by the distance between ideals and reality. In a certain way, he represents an unconscious skeptic who unwillingly and implicitly undermines the univocity of any statement. Michael Gassenmeier, “Tristrams Onkel Toby: Ein Man of Feeling aus ironischer Distanz”, in Anglia 88 (1970): 509–518.

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sessing and exploring its cultural environment would possess enough narrative impetus to become an ever-unfolding lifeworld.241 In Sterne’s novel, the world is tailored to Tristram’s shape and size. It consists in the diverse circumstances around his life, which not only include his position in a unified spatio-temporal framework, but also his praxis, imaginary places, and an intersubjective sphere of influence.242 Now, like everything regarding Tristram, his world is not outlined with statements directly related to him, but rather with opinions and events involving people around him, all of which together sealed his fate. The midwife plays a decisive role among these characters. Tristram’s broken nose/wit in the hands of Dr. Slop was caused partly by her lack of experience. Moreover, her role as someone who brings life into the parish makes her a central figure in the world. And still, she is forgotten during some digressive pages until the narrator reminds us: “It is so long since the reader of this rhapsodical work has been parted from the midwife, that it is high time to mention her again to him, merely to put him in mind that there is such a body still in the world […]” (I, xiii, 39). The midwife reappears with this reintroduction as a minuscule dot in a rhapsodical world of epic dimensions. This turns out to be an exaggeration, though. What “world” stands for can hard-

|| 241 For Moglen, every narration is part of Tristram’s memory in The philosophical Irony of Laurence Sterne, 50–51. For Traugott, the novel resorts to formal devices rooted in Locke’s philosophy to construct his world of words in Tristram Shandy's World, xiii, 7–8. Rainer Warning characterizes the novel as a Spielwelt, which means “dass Sterne die traditionelle Vorstellung der Konstanz eines humour-Charakters umfunktionalisiert zum Prinzip der Konsistenz einer spezifisch poetischen Welt.” Warning, Illusion und Wirklichkeit, 40. 242 Lebenswelt helps us understand Sterne’s novel and, although the purpose here is not a systematic comparison, it is still revealing that Tristram defines his world in a manner comparable to Edmund Husserl’s definition. In both cases, the lifeworld originates in a consciousness, since Life, according to Andrea Staiti, means “bei Husserl keineswegs etwas Unerforschliches oder Vorrationales, sondern vielmehr den intentional verfassten Urgrund aller Konstitutionen von Erkenntnis.” Andrea Staiti, “Leben” in Husserl-Lexikon, ed. Hans-Helmuth Gander (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2010), 181. In this subchapter, there will appear several similiarities between Sterne’s chapter dealing with the midwife and the lexicon entry: “Die Lebenswelt ist die Welt der natürlichen Einstellung, wie sie sich in der Einstimmigkeit der ungebrochenen natürlichen Erfahrung darstellt. Sie ist die intersubjektive Welt der Praxis, die alle Gegenstände, auf die sich das alltägliche menschliche Handeln bezieht, mit einschließt, wie auch alle individuellen und gemeinschaftlichen Interessen und Ziele, die die menschliche Praxis horizonthaft bestimmen. Sie ist eine wahrnehmungsmäßig gegebene Welt, zugleich aber auch eine geistig-geschichtliche Kulturwelt, der die Charaktere der Perspektivität bzw. Situativität und der Traditionalität zukommen.” Emanuele Soldinger, “Lebenswelt” in Husserl-Lexikon, 182.

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ly amount to a greatly expanded field in our everyday life, so one could even claim she is a world-renowned midwife, for: […] her fame had spread itself to the very out-edge and circumference of that circle of importance, of which kind every soul living, whether he has a shirt to his back or no,——has one surrounding him;—which said circle, by the way, whenever ’tis said that such a one is of great weight and importance in the world,——I desire may be enlarged or contracted in your worship’s fancy, in a compound ratio of the station, profession, knowledge, abilities, height and depth (measuring both ways) of the personage brought before you. […] In the present case, if I remember, I fixed it about four or five miles, which not only comprehended the whole parish, but extended itself to two or three of the adjacent hamlets in the skirts of the next parish; which made a considerable thing of it. (I, xiii, 39–38)

When somebody utters “world”, it is highly unlikely that this person is talking about the planet as physical place. This might be the case in some contexts, but for the narrator “world” is related to the idea we have built around the intentional space we dwell in. Therefore, we should get rid of the great weight we carry due to our disproportionate feeling of self-importance for a moment; we mustn’t be fooled by the pretentious sound of such a word and be certain that, every time we read “world”, what is meant is the circumference that encloses Tristram’s parish, because no mind can think all the elements, fictional and factual, to be found in the world at large. “World” localizes a body in a spatial framework and an individual in a symbolic order that delimits the scope of actions. A profession, for instance, represents the best category with which to analyze the extents of our world. The limits imposed on the midwife’s movements represent the vital dimension of the parish. In her travels back and forth in this world she brings new generations into the world and becomes involved with everybody. Therein resides her fame: an intersubjective component determines this lifeworld. The stories and gossip told within this radius might undergo changes and variation, but fame’s reach and, consequently, the world’s dimensions, are stable throughout the novel. Fame appears once again in the last volume and gives news of Toby’s amours: “and though whisper’d in the hayloft, Fame caught the notes with her brazen trumpet, and sounded them upon the house-top—In a word, not an old woman in the village or five miles round, who did not understand the difficulties of my uncle Toby’s siege, and what were the secret articles which had delayed the surrender” (IX, xxxii, 804). Fame is merciless in Tristram Shandy. It was not only Toby who was sacrificed on her behalf, but also Yorick, whose “views” (I, x, 24) on the stories told about him could never be known. His infamous pride brought him death in the

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hands of those whom he mocked or perhaps innocently jested with. Which opinions were true and which mere inventions by his detractors and idle gossipers is irrelevant for the composition of a world where fame runs free. “World” subsumes diverse ideas and various accounts, which might leave physical boundaries untouched, but converge in the symbolic plane of different times and places.243 However, the accessible fictional worlds are not endless. They are bound to cultural circumstances and their representations. Maps, for instance, ground the “commerce between the actual and the fictional.”244 A perfect example in this regard is the scene in which Walter plans the continental tour that Tristram’s older brother is supposed to take as a part of his education. If his brother had not died, an experience abroad could have been part of his life journey and could have led him to discover the many stages and characters that dwell in the world at large. That is why Walter is so concentrated on the maps that he seems to enact the voyage in his mind: “Till that moment, my father, who had a map of Sanson’s, and a book of the post-roads before him, had kept his hand upon the head of his compasses, with one foot of them fixed upon Nevers, the last stage he had paid for—purposing to go on from that point with his journey and calculation, […]” (V, ii, 416). Despite the firm footing that a map and calculations might grant him, Walter never reaches his desired destination. Due to his character, on the one hand, his endeavors result impractical because he can never turn his ideas into actions. On the other, every time he starts a disquisition or an argument, a member of the Shandy clan interrupts him, thrusts him into digressions and makes him lose his way. This scene is no exception, so that after being distracted: “He let go his compasses—or rather with a mixed motion between accident and anger, he threw them upon the table; and then there was nothing for him to do, but to return back to Calais (like many others) as wise as he had set out” (V, ii, 416). Since Walter is in the middle of his imaginary journey, he is not sure how to react. He could give in to his anger and scold the culprit, or accept that it is unavoidable to be met by accidents in the middle of the road. Whichever might be the case, he must start from the beginning, like he || 243 For simultaneity and convergence, see Jacques Mayoux, “Variations and the Time-sense in Tristram Shandy”, in The Winged Skull, ed. Arthur H. Cash and John M. Stedmond (London: Methuen, 1971), 3–18. 244 Doležel reflects on the subject thusly: “fictional worlds are accessed through semiotic channels and by means of information processing. Because of the semiotic mediation, accessibility is a bidirectional, multifaceted, and historically changing commerce between the actual and the fictional.” Lubomír Doležel, Heterocosmica (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 20.

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always does, to build theoretical castles in the air “as wise as he had set out.” His travelling experiences do not seem to bring moral progress nor make him wiser. This is a skeptical view of the edifying possibilities of a pilgrimage and its stages. More than familiarizing the reader with his life’s opinions, Tristram’s digressions transgress fictional boundaries. By doing so, they reveal the cultural circumstances in which Tristram is embedded and delineate the fuzzy core of his Self. By hinting at diverse forms of representation and their abrupt interruption, the narrative steers away from a realist illusion taking place in a stable world. Instead, it depicts a lifeworld in which every idea, treatise, or even a banal event has the potential to become a new story that would never define the Self, but circumscribe it. This potential is comparable to the productive force at the core of the Gleichnis in Musil’s novel. In both cases, the reader discovers a way to construe the lifeworld narratively and without the constraints of diverse discourses because: “Lebenswelt ist jene Welt, deren Erschlossenheit wesentlich auf Erzählungen beruht. Mag diese Welt sich im Blick des strengen Wissenschaftlers oder des kritischen Philosophen als Fabel oder Fiktion darstellen, so hat sie doch gerade als diese eine eigene unhintergehbare Wirklichkeit.”245 The novels do not compete with the discourses but try to include them and relegate the epistemological questions to a second plane. Tristram as narrator seems to be aware of his work’s deficiencies. He even justifies the presence of all those contents that could pass, at best, for remnants of mended knowledge: All I know of the matter is—when I sat down, my intent was to write a good book; and as far as the tenuity of my understanding would hold out—a wise, aye, and a discreet—taking care only, as I went along, to put into it all the wit and the judgment (be it more or less) which the great Author and Bestower of them had thought fit originally to give me———so that, as your worships see—’tis just as God pleases. (III, preface, 227)

If Tristram had persisted in one presentation mode or discourse, he could have freed himself from any responsibility by pinning the blame on science, on literature, on the system that grounds his claims. But since he made a great effort to show the finite scope of each perspective, he can only blame the creator who bestowed on him a wit and judgment which roam free through his personality’s rooms and corridors. His narration is an expression developed according to the

|| 245 Karlheinz Stierle, “Die Erzählbarkeit der Welt”, in Text als Handlung (München: Fink, 2012), 261.

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“length and breadth of our necessities” (III, preface, 232). Contingency is turned into a necessity that grows out of a second nature, a necessity that would eagerly comply with a skeptic’s objections and stand down from its privileged position to give place to an alternative modal regime. These necessities cannot be assuaged with knowledge because Tristram’s question revolves around ethical appraisal and the construction of a narrative identity, that is, elements that reveal an ontological side. For Melvyn New, the relevance of the ontological question can explain Tristram’s poor scholarship: “One might argue, of course, that none of Sterne's citations is to be trusted, that the unreliability of Tristram as a narrator is constructed from the materials of false learning, but this is precisely to confuse the ontological question with the epistemological.”246 Tristram, who flees from indeterminateness by employing his moral character in order to render the world intelligible, is not trying to produce knowledge nor fix the truth about his life’s deeds. Instead, he aims at the certainty attained by interweaving diverse texts. He hopes that the construction of a complex pattern will shed some light on the primary narrative, namely, his life.247 This is, of course, a flimsy certainty. He submits neither to the authority of the texts nor to Reason, but his search for identity – heeding Shaftesbury’s recommendations – revels in and feeds off contrasts, conflicts, and disputes. “Thus the narration of Tristram-Sterne, with all its interruptions, digressions, interpolations, in any case advances and makes progress by accepting disagreement and embracing diversity.”248 The heterogeneous mix to which his narrative amounts represents the desired product of his endeavors, or at least that is Tristram’s opinion on the matter: “In a word, my work is digressive, and its progressive too,—and at the

|| 246 Melvyn New, “Sterne and the narrative of Determinateness”, in Eighteenth-Century Fiction 4 (1992): 326. 247 Here I grapple with the main idea in New’s paper: “In addition, the text of Tristram contains numerous interwoven narrative sub-texts that serve as commentaries upon the primary narrative—the marriage contract, the Memoire of the Sorbonne doctors, the sermon, Ernulphus’s curse, passages from Burton and Rabelais, Montaigne and Chambers’ Cyclopoedia, and on and on. These "narratives" restage the narrative strategies of the reader/critic, since they are almost always reifications, efforts to organize and control the flux of events and attitudes (“the life and opinions”) by narrating them into a fixed (that is, a clear and explicable) order and arrangement. What Sterne shows us, I suggest, is that the instinct or desire to order the story is always more powerful than our capacity to rest in muddle, to celebrate disorder without a contrary urge to tidy up the place.” New, “Sterne and the narrative of Determinateness”, 316. 248 Gioiella Bruni Roccia, “Sterne and Shaftesbury Reconsidered: The ‘Characteristics’ of Tristram Shandy”, in The Shandean 25 (2014): 77.

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same time”249 (I, xxii, 81). For Tristram, to narrate is to put into motion his character and enable its progress through its near-ankylosed conduits. The digressive motion emits a centripetal force, forming a core that vanishes when its spinning stops accumulating all possible contents. However, stagnation is neither desired nor perhaps possible in Tristram’s world, at least until death puts a stop to it.

2.5.3 Digression and essayismus Horror of stasis, of stagnation, angst of becoming habituated to an environment to such an extent that its particularities fade away and reveal a place voided of all minimal differences; such is the fear that motivates Ulrich and Tristram to keep moving, or more precisely, to develop a style that exposes its own progression through different discourses and perspectives. The essayistic and digressive novels share a dynamism that is determined by the problem of the Self and the method for grappling with it, as well as the problem of the form their worlds adopt. Ulrich’s world can be dismantled because its motor, that is, a continuous performance of analytic dissolution striving to determine the Self’s pristine foundation, is grounded in the idea of complex phenomena composed of simpler units or attributes; whereas Tristram’s accumulative world results from his mastery over the overdetermined sfumato with which he plots the indeterminate line of beauty. But despite their dissimilar texture, both novels wish to draw certainty or conviction from and by depicting world models and the opinions that project them “in a continuous state of fermentation, change and degradation,”250 worlds voided of a vantage point. Consequently, their results can only be fictional hypotheses. These protracted hypotheses function as salient structures that posit interrelationships between diverse symbolic levels. For this reason, they “are not forever confined within a given fictional genre. Since their circulation involves the entire cultural space, theory of fiction cannot be isolated from

|| 249 My interpretation of this passage complies with New’s and also with Lehman’s: “What is digression under the aspect of clock time (the physical life) is progression under the aspect of being time (associational life): we learn why people acted or spoke as they did, because Tristram remembers in order that he may know.” Benjamin H. Lehman, “Of Time, Personality, and the Author”, in Laurence Sterne. A collection of critical essays, ed. John Traugott (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1968), 26. 250 Pavel, Fictional Worlds, 140.

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the general economy of the imaginary.”251 Confronted with this unavoidable experience of a variegated imaginary, Ulrich and Tristram seem to develop their narrative projects within the boundaries sketched by Pavel for modernity’s crucial concern: Their “reactions vary between nihilism and nostalgia. Nihilists interpret changes from one [ontological] landscape to another as signaling the complete absence of order. To them, each landscape is only deceitful ossification of one kind of illusion. To establish oneself somewhere, to dwell in a world model, is in the nihilist’s eye a mortal sin. Conversely, the nostalgic is homesick for old times when ontological stability was still the rule.”252 Unity and homogeneity make an ontological landscape inhabitable. The representations of that ontological landscape unify the diverse items in the scenery through a systematization that avoids discrepancies. Although the central perspective might best exemplify this picture, one should not focus only on the product, but highlight the role of the consciousness that produces an image and is simultaneously constructed in this representing. This consciousness can resort to straight and transparent thought or behave like Sterne’s and Musil’s narrators who deviate from the straight path and into different directions. However, stepping into uncharted territory, eschewing geometry and without a ruler to trace a line with, will probably provoke a despairing pang and move one to invoke the writer’s manes: O ye powers! (for powers ye are, and great ones too)—which enable mortal man to tell a story worth the hearing———that kindly shew him, where he is to begin it—and where he is to end it——what he is to put into it——and what he is to leave out—how much of it he is to cast into a shade—and whereabouts he is to throw his light!—Ye, who preside over this vast empire of biographical freebooters, and see how many scrapes and plunges your subjects hourly fall into;——will you do one thing? (III, xxiii, 244)

To choose one thing, one element providing an anchor for his biographical account, means, for Tristram, to forsake other possible narrative threads, to truncate the lived simultaneity, to commit himself to one mode of presentation. Under different circumstances, one would never hesitate to offer a new acquaintance a biographical account revealing one’s goals and making interaction easier, but Tristram is free from pragmatic constraints. He is accountable to his own conscience and critical thinking. The movement inherent to the novel’s narrative style hints at its self-imposed limits and constantly redistributes the

|| 251 Pavel, Fictional Worlds, 135. 252 Pavel, Fictional Worlds, 142.

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relations within the historical field. Although there is a virtually infinite number of narratives that would lead to a better assessment of the events and although Tristram’s method expands into all cultural, textual and generic directions,253 there is still a unique order to the narrative, a riverbed for its flow: This, Sir, is a very different story from that of the earth’s moving round her axis, in her diurnal rotation, with her progress in her elliptick orbit which brings about the year, and constitutes that variety and vicissitude of seasons we enjoy;—though I own it suggested the thought,—as I believe the greatest of our boasted improvements and discoveries have come from such trifling hints. Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine;——they are the life, the soul of reading!— take them out of this book, for instance,—you might as well take the book along with them;—one cold eternal winter would reign in every page of it;[...] (I, xxii, 81)

If we were to expurgate the narrative, we would be left only with an infecund soil from which no ideas could spring. Its frozen forms would be – even for the foremost cabbage planter – impossible to break, no seeds could grow there. Like the planetary motion that brings light and seasonal change, digressions follow their own moving principle. Their regularity depends on a form that defines its own potential, unveils a panorama and assimilates ideas in an individual manner. Digressions represent Tristram Shandy’s structural attempt to convey vicissitude and contingency, and to overcome them by acknowledging the differences scattered by elliptical oscillations. Since there are no stable geometrical forms that help orientate him, Tristram must yield to his personality and its unique manner of progressing through the textual traces handed down. He must, according to Walter, respect the authority of tradition and use the “relicks of learning” (V, I, 408) systematically:

|| 253 “In jedem Augenblick arbeitet sie [die Geschichte] gleichermaßen an einem bei allem Wechsel sich durchhaltenden thematischen Kern, einer zentralen Person oder Personenkonstellation und einem sich wandelnden Horizont, der immer zugleich eine Virtualität unendlich vieler anderer Geschichten und anderer thematischer Kerne aufscheinen lässt.” Stierle, “Die Erzählbarkeit der Welt”, 263.

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Tristram, said he, shall be made to conjugate every word in the dictionary, backwards and forwards the same way;——every word, Yorick, by this means, you see, is converted into a thesis or an hypothesis;—every thesis and hypothesis have an offspring of propositions;— and each proposition has its own consequences and conclusions; every one of which leads the mind on again, into fresh tracks of enquiries and doubtings.——The force of this engine, added my father, is incredible in opening a child’s head.——’Tis enough, brother Shandy, cried my uncle Toby, to burst it into a thousand splinters.—— “ (VI, ii, 492)

Splinters in the form of a thousand fragments of learning is what Tristram becomes. He might not be as scrupulous as his father wished, but Walter should still be proud of his son. Tristram learned from his father’s mistakes and he can let go of ideas without remorse. He can digress instead of committing to a thought. Resoluteness and single-mindedness are the form that defines Walter’s character: “In his presentation of Walter’s fantasy world and in his exposure of the follies of professional system-builders, Sterne suggests what happens when the mind becomes absorbed in its own forms. Reason is unable to deal with heterogeneity. Its propensity is for simplification and, therefore, distortion.”254 The distortions and contradictions in Walter’s reflections, as well as his obsessive personality, become evident through the perspectival change in Tristram’s narratives. The apple, however, does not fall far from the tree. Although Tristram is flexible enough to let an idea go instead of waiting for an interruption like Walter does, he is still governed by an obsessive character. Tristram channels his obsessive energy into a form that extrudes a rich intertextuality. Hence, the main difference is that Walter speculates in a straight line, while Tristram has mastered digressions and “the art of digression is the art of presenting effects on various scales.”255 Digressions are, therefore, not so far from the Essayismus in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften. With their constant shifting between discourses, they put a subject into perspective and, consequently, steal the footing from any system builder. Digressions pick out one side of an object and display it like an Essay: Ungefähr wie ein Essay in der Folge seiner Abschnitte ein Ding von vielen Seiten nimmt, ohne es ganz zu erfassen, — denn ein ganz erfaßtes Ding verliert mit einem Male seinen Umfang und schmilzt zu einem Begriff ein — glaubte er, Welt und eigenes Leben am richtigsten ansehen und behandeln zu können. Der Wert einer Handlung oder einer Eigenschaft, ja sogar deren Wesen und Natur erschienen ihm abhängig von den Umständen, die

|| 254 Moglen, The philosophical Irony of Laurence Sterne, 97. 255 Alan D. Mckillop, “Laurence Sterne”, in Laurence Sterne, ed. John Traugott, 52.

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sie umgaben, von den Zielen, denen sie dienten, mit einem Wort, von dem bald so, bald anders beschaffenen Ganzen, dem sie angehörten. Das ist übrigens nur die einfache Beschreibung der Tatsache, daß uns ein Mord als ein Verbrechen oder als eine heroische Tat erscheinen kann […]. Dann fanden alle moralischen Ereignisse in einem Kraftfeld statt, dessen Konstellation sie mit Sinn belud […]. (MoE 250)

Confronted with a situation oscillating between total assimilation, in which a concept conceals the many sides of an object, and relentless isolation, in which irreproducible circumstances define the framework and unparalleled meaning of an action; the only certainty one can hold onto is movement itself. A change in position is what triggers the questions about our location and forces us to look up and inspect the forms and lines surrounding us. In some occasions, we might need to attend to pragmatic constraints, but this is not the only path our thinking can take.256 Without pressing matters to attend to, reflections can wander through diverse geometries and supersede the primacy of causality and the straight line, thereby undermining the unified spatial framework.257 In chapter 62, Ulrich unpacks, with the help of the narrator, a similar concept under the name of Essayismus. Here, the narrator highlights how there is neither beginning nor end, just lingering possibilities: Der Wille seiner eigenen Natur, sich zu entwickeln, verbietet ihm, an das Vollendete zu glauben; aber alles, was ihm entgegentritt, tut so, als ob es vollendet wäre. Er ahnt: diese Ordnung ist nicht so fest, wie sie sich gibt; kein Ding, kein Ich, keine Form, kein Grundsatz sind sicher, alles ist in einer unsichtbaren, aber niemals ruhenden Wandlung begriffen, im Unfesten liegt mehr von der Zukunft als im Festen, und die Gegenwart ist nichts als eine Hypothese, über die man noch nicht hinausgekommen ist. (MoE 250)

For Ulrich’s skeptical view, the events that took place cannot be enthroned due to necessity; there might be an explanation revealing that a certain event led to a fixed order, but to consider an actualization as a consummated accomplishment and not just a stage in what is perhaps an aimless progression represents

|| 256 In Ansätze zu neuer Ästhetik (1925), Musil formulates a comparable idea thusly: “Es ist nicht das Denken, sondern einfach schon die Notwendigkeit praktischer Orientierung, was zur Formelhaftigkeit treibt.” Robert Musil, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 2, ed. by Adolf Frisé (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1978), 1147. Nübel’s discussion on the role of perception for Musil’s Essayismus led me to this quote in: Nübel, Robert Musil. Essayismus, 234. 257 “Das lineare und kausale Nacheinander in der Zeit wird abgelöst durch ein relationales und perspektivisches Verknüpfungsprinzip, das die Körper, Formen, Gestalten, Empfindungen zu Elementenkomplexen im Raum ordnet.” Nübel, Robert Musil. Essayismus, 74.

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for Ulrich a category mistake. Neither has a state of affairs ingrained itself in reality because it is a necessary step towards completion, nor should one construe the present as the necessary circumstance on which any change is grounded. Ulrich’s conception is founded in contingency, and the only idea that can countervail it is vicissitude, a stylistic motion that is transitory and palpable but never flirts with a solid state or idea for too long. Ulrich might not hoard opinions like Tristram, but, after all, he identifies and offers the reader all the attributes and accidents blurring the fundamental image of his “I”, only to cast them all aside later. Both protagonists are familiar with essayistic thinking: “Das essayistische Denken ist in eine dynamische Konfiguration verwebt, in eine Textur, die aus miteinander verschlungenen Gedankenfäden besteht. Die argumentative, funktionale, logische Komponente des Gedankens, einsinnig und auf ein Ziel gerichtet, versinnlicht im Bild des diskursiven Gedankenfadens, wird von seiner konnotativ, assoziativen, sentimentalen Dimension überlagert.”258 Tristram Shandy’s prose meets the criteria for Essayismus,259 not only due to its associative and sentimental nature but also because it displays a highly complex intertextuality that decomposes, rearranges, creates, and takes its sources out of context.260 It manipulates metatextuality. The narrator, for instance, comments on the possible reception and interpretation of certain passages. Tristram indulges in self-reflexivity, which liberates him from the constraints of an identity construed as being the same.261 His personal identity is nourished by the Shaftesburyan art of Soliloquy, which is also a way to interpret the Essay, according to Birgit Nübel.262 While Ulrich holds discussions with Kakania’s intelligentsia, Tristram has conversations with different imagined characters created on the spot, like Madam, Sir, etc. His identity is defined relationally, in the sense that is constructed by a language aware of its relationship to others. It is also an identity that becomes diversified through the various discourses that try to define him. In this way, he threads and thrusts the essayistic

|| 258 Nübel, Robert Musil. Essayismus, 155. 259 Nübel, Robert Musil. Essayismus, 127. For Georg Lukács, Sterne plays a decisive role in the history of the Essay. 260 Nübel, Robert Musil. Essayismus, 41. 261 Nübel, Robert Musil. Essayismus, 46–51, 69. 262 “Der Essay könnte aber auch als ein figurativ inszenierter Monolog, eine Rechtfertigung des Autor-Ichs in eigener Sache mit verteilten Rollen gelesen werden. Szenario dieser Buchbesprechung ist das ins Groteske gesteigerte Musil’sche Gehirn, das nicht als eine Art Bühnenkulisse dekorativ im Hintergrund steht, sondern als gigantische dreidimensionale Plastik modelliert ist, auf dem das essayistische Ich herumrutscht.” Nübel, Robert Musil. Essayismus, 183.

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dynamism that disrupts chronology,263 and alludes to other possibilities that could also be actualized.264 Among these features, assimilation and repetition are of special interest. Tristram’s lament about the “relicks of learning” (V, I, 408) and Ulrich’s concern with autonomy draw attention to the literary tradition that slowly becomes a rigid form unable to convey the changing circumstances. But despite their objections and the impossibility of creating unprecedented stylistic devices suitable for the unique contemporary circumstances, the essayistic motion and its constant shifting underscores the minuscule differences.265 They arise when one employs a traditional device in an intertextually variegated context as a method of appropriating different genres and giving form to the “I”. Difference and repetition reveal a manner of approaching this hodgepodge “I”: Man beginnt, es immer mehr als beschränkt zu empfinden, unwillkürlich erworbene Wiederholungsdispositionen einem Menschen als Charakter zuzuschreiben und dann seinen Charakter für die Wiederholungen verantwortlich zu machen. Man lernt das Wechselspiel zwischen Innen und Außen erkennen, und gerade durch das Verständnis für das Unpersönliche am Menschen ist man dem Persönlichen auf neue Spuren gekommen, auf gewisse einfache Grundverhaltensweisen, einen Ichbautrieb, der wie der Nestbautrieb der Vögel aus vieler Art Stoff nach ein paar Verfahren sein Ich aufrichtet. (MoE 252)

For Ulrich, the agency entailed in what can be called the internalized “personal” or “private” traits can be recovered to some degree if one concentrates on character. This concept is defined by a regularity in the transactions between the inner and outer dimensions of an “I”, and such regularity allows us to speak about a fundamental behavior constructed with fragments of learning. Character does not exclude motion but is inherent to it, since getting acquainted with someone’s character can never lead to certainty about this person’s future reactions or inner life.

|| 263 “Die Konfiguration der Begriffe und Bilder als dynamisch-reflexive Bewegung der essayistischen Textur ersetzt den temporär konstituierten Handlungsverlauf eines narrativen ‘Zuerst’ und ‘Danach’. Der Spaziergang der Gedanken – ein weiterer Topos der Textform Essay und ihrer Erforschung – kennt nicht wie die traditionelle Narration Anfang, Mitte und Ende, sondern ist gegenüber seinem Gegenstand und dessen zeitlicher Anordnung indifferent.” Nübel, Robert Musil. Essayismus, 71. 264 Nübel, Robert Musil. Essayismus, 121. 265 For assimilation, appropriation and intertextuality, see Nübel, Robert Musil. Essayismus, 274–279. For repetition that underscores difference, see 404–419.

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To understand character as a form is to grapple with the “I” depicted by the essayist or “Meister des innerlich schwebenden Lebens” (MoE 253). Character, in the sense of ethos, is a concept flexible enough to refer to the diverse forms that the lived266 can acquire when distilled by the representational endeavors of a a consciousness, but without assimilating or insulating this “I” with cultural accretion. Within the essayistic framework, mind does not refer to a substance but to relational concept in continuous transformation.267 Therefore, only by reflecting upon motion can one attempt to delve into the essayistic “I.” This personal identity is a internal textual function, a core shaped and disfigured, even dissolved by the inner stance of self-irony and relativization: Essayismus ist ein Vertextungsverfahren, das ein durchgestrichenes Zentrum von den Rändern bzw. von der Peripherie her umschreibt. Das essayistische Umkreisen, der Umweg, das ‘konstruktive’ Irren folgt nicht einer geraden Linie oder einer klaren Zielvorgabe, sondern der “Wendung”, die sich dem zuwendet, wovon sie sich abwendet und die sich vom dem abwendet, dem sie sich im selben Augenblick zuwendet.268

In short, Essayismus defines a text’s innermost structure and, consequently, it cannot be reduced either to thematic or to stylistic traits.269 The principle on which Ulrich’s and Tristram’s inscriptions as narrative identities operate generates a motion similar to the essayistic Vertextungsprinzip. Both protagonists are characterized by a self-reflexive movement and an incessant intertextual exploration that, one could fairly argue, presupposes contingency at its core. Additionally, this self-reflexive movement addresses the statically unbridgeable incongruity between actions and decisions, attempts to assuage the unity lost with the epic, or, expressed in Kierkegaard’s terms, endeavors to overcome the fundamental irony of modern experience.270 || 266 This is related to Nübel’s take on the lived or “Erlebnis” in relation to Essayismus. Nübel, Robert Musil. Essayismus, 244. 267 Nübel, Robert Musil. Essayismus, 319. 268 Nübel, Robert Musil. Essayismus, 495. See also 196, 214. 269 For Nübel, Essayismus is not so much a method to gain knowledge, but rather defines it as: “Methode der Darstellung. Essayismus wird hier verstanden als einzeltext-, gattungs- wie diskursüberschreitendes Vertextungsprinzip, welches die Verfahren der interdiskursiven Traversion selbstreflexiv kommentiert. Essayismus ist kein Textmerkmal, das sich auf der Grundlage von inhaltlichen oder formalen Kriterien festschreiben ließe. Essayismus ist ein Modus (selbst-)kritischer Reflexion, der in der Darstellung/Vertextung seine eigenen Voraussetzungen, Verfahren und Grenzen thematisiert.” Nübel, Robert Musil. Essayismus, 1. 270 Although Nübel does mention Kierkegaard in another context, the wording here bears resemblance to the latter’s philosophy: “Das Denken wird hier nicht nur gedacht, sondern zugleich auch fühlbar, sinnlich konkret gemacht.” Nübel, Robert Musil. Essayismus, 2. Also

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Both the essayistic and the digressive-conversationalist novel weave a similar pattern,271 in which their protagonists play an analogous role. Ulrich and Tristram reveal the limits of their own essayistic forms. By becoming fictional characters and intimating that their endeavor is guided either by an analytic or an accumulative personality, they posit a concrete understanding of Essayismus, in the sense of a style with the potential to assimilate or dissect every object or expression that comes its way. This concrete formulation reveals, according to Nübel, how the literary construction surpasses the scrutiny of a single character.272 In both novels, the character constellation adds a comparative aspect that deters us from enthroning an Essayismus bounded to an ethos as vantage point. The object of study for Essayismus, or rather the matter that it manipulates, is the Gleichnis. If a person were to fix his or her eyes on one of the different moments depicted by the essayistic motion, this person would gain a truth, but lose the Gleichnis in the distillation. Nevertheless, there is a further possibility for tackling this raw material fed into the essayistic engine: Die Übersetzung des Wortes Essay als Versuch, wie sie gegeben worden ist, enthält nur ungenau die wesentlichste Anspielung auf das literarische Vorbild; denn ein Essay ist nicht der vor- oder nebenläufige Ausdruck einer Überzeugung, die bei besserer Gelegenheit zur Wahrheit erhoben, ebensogut aber auch als Irrtum erkannt werden könnte (von solcher Art sind bloß die Aufsätze und Abhandlungen, die gelehrte Personen als “Abfälle ihrer Werkstätte” zum besten geben); sondern ein Essay ist die einmalige und unabänderliche Gestalt, die das innere Leben eines Menschen in einem entscheidenden Gedanken annimmt. Nichts ist dem fremder als die Unverantwortlichkeit und Halbfertigkeit der Einfälle, die man Subjektivität nennt, aber auch wahr und falsch, klug und unklug sind keine

|| interesting in this case is that Nübel sees in the literary paradigm of the end of the eighteenth century the roots of Modernist writing praxis and argues that this writing eschews totality and delves into contingency through various self-reflexive methods. (4) 271 “So lässt sich an Musils essayistischem Romanfragment Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften eine Poetologie des modernen Romans herausarbeiten, die Essayismus als konstitutives Element auf mehreren Ebenen ausmacht: Essayismus ist hier gleichermaßen a) utopischer Entwurf des Protagonisten Ulrich, b) Figurenreflexion bzw. -diskurs, c) Erzählerkommentar zur Figurenbzw. Handlungsebene, d) narratologisches Konzept, e) Romantheorie und f) Metakritik moderner Poetologie.” Nübel, Robert Musil. Essayismus, 6. 272 Nübel, Robert Musil. Essayismus, 33. Here Nübel cites Hans-Joachim Pieper, Musils Philosophie (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2002), 150: “Indem Musil Ulrich als eine Art Statthalter des Essayismus in den Roman hineinversetzt und an ihm seine eigene Grundhaltung reflektiert, gelingt ihm literarisch, was theoretisch stets mißlingt: der relativistische Perspektivismus wird seinerseits perspektivistisch relativiert. Der induktive Essayismus wird im performativen Essayismus essayistisch in Frage gestellt.”

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Begriffe, die sich auf solche Gedanken anwenden lassen, die dennoch Gesetzen unterstehn, die nicht weniger streng sind, als sie zart und unaussprechlich erscheinen. (MoE 253)

To assess an Essay with convictions or truth and error as criteria, is to disregard its inherent motion and place its contents under an inadequate light. So maybe the suitable way of understanding the essay is as the place where circumstances and a mind’s reaction to them converge. An essay does not expurgate the opinions and unwanted associations assailing the mind. Instead of disqualifying mental contents as whims and caprices of reason, the essayist embraces her own humoral uniqueness as a constitutive part of experience.273 Therefore, to understand an essayist, it seems more appropriate to take a closer look into her personality as principle of intelligibility instead of corroborating her truths. The only condition here is that this approach should never be stopped. Any pause to catch a breath and look around for a fixed point from which to orientate oneself is a flirtation with the outdated idea of the unmoved mover, which was superseded by the “movement of the moved”: Nichts ist übrigens bezeichnender als die unfreiwillige Erfahrung, die man mit gelehrten und vernünftigen Versuchen macht, solche große Essayisten auszulegen, die Lebenslehre, so wie sie ist, in ein Lebenswissen umzuwandeln und der Bewegung der Bewegten einen “Inhalt” abzugewinnen; es bleibt von allem ungefähr so viel übrig wie von dem zarten Farbenleib einer Meduse, nachdem man sie aus dem Wasser gehoben und in Sand gelegt hat. (MoE 254)

While digressions are the lights in the Shandean narration, for the essayist, digressions are the tinctures that reveal a nuanced world. For both, they represent the means to travel through changing constellations thrusted by an inner principle. This individual gravitational center contests and unmasks as a momentary mirage the stable truth that springs from a gravitational center common to all objects and beings. In narrative terms, this conception that revolves around a decentered cosmos leads to the construction of a lifeworld, in which || 273 “Vernünftig ist hier allerdings nicht die Ordnung der Gedanken im Sinne einer hypotaktisch gegliederten Abfolge der Argumente, sondern deren Organisation nach dem Prinzip der wissenschaftlich-funktionalen Betriebsführung. Die ‘aphoristische Schreibweise’ löse das Ganze, so zum Beispiel eine aus Anfang, Mitte und Ende bestehende ‘Geschichte’, zu einem ‘Ganzen aus Fragmenten’ auf. Die Zerlegung folge dabei nicht dem vernunftgemäßschulphilosophischen Prinzipien der Deduktion, sondern einer anderen, nur scheinbar ‘launenhaften’ Vernunft, nicht einem logischen Denksystem, sondern der Gedankenökonomie des Fragments.” Nübel, Robert Musil. Essayismus, 257.

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the spatio-temporal framework is relativized and neither origin nor causality are adequate categories for understanding.274 But more important is the fact that Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften and Tristram Shandy develop a discussion around transcendence and immanence in relation to ethics. Both merge ethics and aesthetics in a manner resembling Nübel’s reflections: [Das] ‘Gute’ ist allerdings nicht inhaltlich vorgegeben, sondern vielmehr als Funktionsäquivalent für ein “lebendiges Ethos” zu verstehen, wie ihn die Dichtung verkörpert. Ihr Erkenntnisziel – der mögliche Mensch unter der Bedingung der Möglichkeit des ‘rechten Lebens’ – liegt im Jenseits (‘Transzendenz’). Der Weg jedoch ist durch eine Darstellungsmethode vorgegeben, welche sich in Herkunft und Wirkung auf ein Diesseits (‘Immanenz’) bezieht.275

Moral character offers a figure of thought that helps us approach this living ethos by conveying its dynamism. It is a heuristic for the Other, which abides by the Other’s unthematizable immanence.

2.5.4 Ethos, form, and its hermeneutic scope This ever-changing ethos is illustrated with shifting conduits through which ideas circulate and become entangled with each other in an associative process, interweaving discourses and dissolving any regularity grounded in what an idea asserts. The only regularity and motor of this “endless reflection”276 lies beyond the surface, in Essayismus as a structural inscribing principle. However, like all the principles dealt with in Musil’s novel, it is neither exempt from skeptical comments about its scope nor from Ulrich’s sneers. Although not at first glance, Ulrich’s personality ultimately represents an analytic ethos which cannot be satiated with any kind of content. He manipulates ideas, inverts or places them sideways just to dissect them. Although dismemberment is the goal, it is his mental endeavors that indicate which elements of past compositions should be severed. Ulrich constructs his consciousness through representations that are based on identifying and cutting the threads linking associations, which should not be considered as merely arbitrary or produced by an uncanny juggling with the dissimilar. Associations produce their subject, the historical field, or a person’s life, since

|| 274 Nübel, Robert Musil. Essayismus, 496. 275 Nübel, Robert Musil. Essayismus, 181. For immanence in Nübel’s study, see also 198. 276 Nübel, Robert Musil. Essayismus, 181.

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“Assoziation” heißt die Vereinigung von Elementen zur Einheit der Zeit oder des Raumes, zur Einheit des Ich oder des Gegenstandes, zum Ganzen eines Dinges oder einer Folge von Ereignissen – zu Reihen, deren Glieder durch den Gesichtspunkt von Ursache und Wirkung, und zu solchen, die durch den Gesichtspunkt von “Mittel” und “Zweck” miteinander verbunden sind. “Assoziation” gilt ferner als der hinreichende Ausdruck für das logische Gesetz der Verknüpfung der Einzelnen zur begrifflichen Einheit der Erkenntnis, wie etwa für die Formen der Gestaltung, die sich im Aufbau des ästhetischen Bewußtseins als wirksam erweisen.277

What functions as a binding logic in Musil’s and Sterne’s novels is a thought pattern that steers away from causality and origin as explanatory criteria. The laws governing relations between objects in Tristram’s and Ulrich’s worlds are rooted in a conception that can be called immanent. This does not exclude in any way the defining role of transcendence. In fact, their contraposition is where the link between the first and second part of this investigation lies. The first part depicted how a biographical account can be used to ground a claim in rationality and to assess the discrepancy between actions and decisions. Such attempts meet with difficulties when a common world order is missing and the narrations favor understanding and not the pronouncement of a sentence. In this situation, conflicting images of the world are contending with each other. In the second part, these images were further explored by delving into the concern with absolute truth that cannot be attained and reduces the experience of the world’s manifoldness. Overall, both parts touch upon many issues entailed by the process of secularization in modernity and its core, namely, self-assertion defined as a programme for Being that goes beyond biological and economic preservation.278 In his study, Blumenberg explains that, in modernity, the human became a “verfügbares Faktum” and the loss of the Medieval order gave rise to a “schöpferisch handelndes Wesen.”279 This paradigm change started by assum|| 277 Cassirer, Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, 36. 278 “‘Selbstbehauptung’ meint daher hier nicht die nackte biologische und ökonomische Erhaltung des Lebewesens Mensch mit den seiner Natur verfügbaren Mitteln. Sie meint ein Daseinsprogramm, unter das der Mensch in einer geschichtlichen Situation seine Existenz stellt und in dem er sich vorzeichnet, wie er es mit der ihn umgebenden Wirklichkeit aufnehmen und wie er seine Möglichkeiten ergreifen will. Im Verstehen der Welt und den darin implizierten Erwartungen, Einschätzungen und Sinngebungen vollzieht sich eine fundamentale Wandlung, die sich nicht aus Tatsachen der Erfahrung summiert, sondern ein Inbegriff von Präsumtionen ist, die ihrerseits den Horizont möglicher Erfahrungen und ihrer Deutung bestimmen und die Vorgegebenheit dessen enthalten, was es für den Menschen mit der Welt auf sich hat.” Blumenberg, “Aspekte der Epochenschwelle”, 151. 279 Blumenberg, “Aspekte der Epochenschwelle”, 152.

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ing an “Urschuld” and responsibility for the evils in the world, whose mixture with the loss of absolute foundations left the Self as the only basis on which to ground the relationship with the world. It paved the way for a self-assertion nourished by the image of the world that one can produce and therefore use as a tool to understand oneself. However, a problem arises when self-assertion is construed partly as self-preservation and begins encroaching on all directions. A rivalry between different manners of construing the world ensues and leads to discussions revolving around the Moosbrugger complex and Tristram’s resorting to judicial eloquence. Both are enmeshed in the struggle of the process of secularization, which is a movement between absolute transcendence and absolute immanence.280 Forms, in the abstract sense of regular mental activity, play a crucial role. Forms posit the conduits through which the potency to make the world intelligible is channeled. Whether defined by “straight thinking”, or by a singular moral character or ethos, they serve to constrain the creative potency of the individual and allow us to understand it. Form seems thus to be a bastion for modernity. Such a claim is more convincing if one bears in mind the interpretation that Onora O’Neill develops around Kant’s practical philosophy regarding autonomy. She argues that constraints help shape practical knowledge and construct authority by regulating the use of our capacities according to some plan that removes us from indeterminateness.281 But these constraints should not reduce the possible contents that can be thought. Rather, in a manner comparable to Ulrich’s and Tristram’s character, the reason that O’Neill underscores in Kantian deontological ethics is related to the search for a common principle. This common principle is based on iterations of reason that heeds a “plurality of

|| 280 In this paragraph I draw from Blumenberg, “Aspekte der Epochenschwelle”, 146–153, 159, 202. 281 “Going back to the metaphors of construction, we might put it this way: The elements of human knowledge are not self-constructing; they must always be put together according to some plan or other. No master plan is inscribed in each one of us; rather we must devise a plan that assembles the various elements. This plan must not presuppose unavailable capacities to coordinate, such as a pre-established harmony between reasoners or between each reasoner and a transcendent reality. The most basic requirement for construction by any plurality of agents must then be negative. It can be no more than the requirement that any fundamental principles of thought and action we deploy be ones that it is not impossible for all to follow. There may be many differing detailed plans that fall within this constraint.” Onora O’Neill, “Reason and politics in the Kantian enterprise”, in Constructions of Reason. Explorations on Kant's practical philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 19.

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voices or agents who share a world” and define the constraints for acting and cognition.282 The boundaries are set by language, however. Language is the handle by which to move and that moves this fictional world. Ulrich’s and Tristram’s worlds spring from a hermeneutical understanding and represent a “potentially understandable being,” an open-ended polysemy to be continuously appropriated283 and even articulated in a lifeworld. After ensuring, through our abilities, the satisfaction of basic needs, we can gain distance and look at the world through language’s configuring eyes.284 In this kind of world, there is no vantage point from which to establish one’s location. Neither physics nor linguistics can provide a stable standpoint or a schema to peruse experience free from language’s fetters.285 Here resides the

|| 282 “Critique of reason is possible only if we think of critique as recursive and reason as constructed rather than imposed. The constraint on possibilities of construction is imposed by the fact that the principles are to be found for a plurality of possible voices or agents who share a world. Nothing has been established about principles of cognitive order for solitary beings. All that has been established for beings who share a world is that they cannot base this sharing on adopting unshareable principles. Presumably many specific conformations of cognitive and moral order are possible; in each case the task of the Categorical Imperative is not to dictate, but to constrain possibilities for acting and for cognition. Theoretical rationality constrains but does not determine what can be thought or believed, just as practical rationality constrains but does not dictate what may be done: ‘we should be able at the same time to show the unity of practical and theoretical reason in a common principle, since in the end there can only be one and the same reason, which must be differentiated solely in its application.’ (G, IV, 391)” O’Neill, “Reason and politics in the Kantian enterprise”, 27. 283 Damir Barbaric, “Die Grenzen zum Unsagbaren. Sprache als Horizont einer hermeneutischen Ontologie (GW 1, 442–478)”, in Hans-Georg Gadamer. Wahrheit…, ed. Günter Figal, 202. “Das potentiell verständliche Sein heißt bei Gadamer auch ‘Welt’. Dementsprechend ist nicht das Sein, sondern die Welt, und zwar die menschliche Welt das eigentümliche Thema der philosophischen Hermeneutik. […] Mit ‘Welt’ meint Gadamer den allumfassenden Sinnzusammenhang, oder die unabgeschlossene Offenheit der immer von neuem anzueignenden geschichtlichen Überlieferung.” 284 Barbaric, “Die Grenzen zum Unsagbaren”, 203. “Gegenüber von Welt zu stehen, heißt für Gadamer dasselbe wie zu sprechen. Welt und Sprache sind auf das Innigste miteinander verbunden: ‘Wer Sprache hat, ‘hat’ die Welt’ (GW 1, 457).” 285 “Die Physik gewährt diesen Standort nicht, weil es überhaupt nicht die Welt, d. h. das Ganze des Seienden ist, was sie als ihren Gegenstand erforscht und berechnet. Ebensowenig kennt aber auch die vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft, die die Sprachen in ihrem Bau studiert, einen sprachfreien Standort, von dem aus das Ansich des Seienden erkennbar wäre und für den die verschiedenen Formen sprachlicher Welterfahrung als schematisierende Auswahl aus dem Ansichseienden rekonstruierbar würden – analog den Lebenswelten der Tiere, die man nach ihren Bauprinzipien erforscht. Vielmehr liegt in jeder Sprache ein unmittelbarer

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difference between moral character as a form and the digressive or essayistic novel. Unlike the broader view conveyed by the novels, both characters are prone to confuse “die Sachlichkeit der Sprache mit der Objektivität der Wissenschaft”286 due to the interrelationship between their perception and intuition. The denizens of both novels express themselves idiosyncratically to assimilate and apply their own tinctures to the world’s objects. However, the leaps between discourses and the cross-contamination, which ensues from conversations and produces a high intertextual and motivistic density, reveals a language working beyond the scope of a single form or schema. Savoring the indeterminateness of a language dipped in tradition is what allows us to carry on an endless conversation. This language conception characterizes our words as accidents to discuss. Unlike the divine word, our language is incomplete and imperfect. Consequently, it is prone to change, so it is defined by its potentiality to be built through mental activity, an “emanation intellectualis”.287 The humanist allusions that shed a new light on Sterne’s literary depiction of associative minds is crucial in Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophy. He criticizes the comparison with a divine, original, or natural language through Cassirer’s and the Cusanus’s reflections on variations in language and on the congruent but imprecise human knowledge.288 Here, language’s potentiality is the key element and is comparable to a character’s assimilative thrust: “Von endlichen Mitteln einen unendlichen Gebrauch machen zu können, ist das eigentliche Wesen der Kraft, die ihrer selbst inne ist. Sie umgreift alles, woran sie sich zu betätigen vermag. So ist auch die sprachliche Kraft allen inhaltlichen Anwendungen überlegen. Als ein Formalismus des Könnens ist sie daher von aller inhaltlichen Bestimmtheit des Gesprochenen ablösbar.”289 Couldn’t we consider Ulrich’s Möglichkeitssinn as akin to the Formalismus des Könnens? Or that, in both novels, what one can do with language depends on an inner form? If granted, then the view of a possibilitarian can be approached and understood by delving into the forms and languages articulating and appropriating a world. The hermeneutic experience expressed by Essayismus and by digressions supersedes self-assertion and consciousness as the core from which to under|| Bezug auf die Unendlichkeit des Seienden. Sprache haben bedeutet eben eine Seinsweise, die ganz anders ist als die Umweltgebundenheit der Tiere.” Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, 456– 457. 286 Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, 457. 287 Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, 427. See also 430. 288 Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, 439–442. 289 Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, 444.

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stand the world. Instead, the novels advocate, with their transactions between diverse perspectives, for language’s appeal, or perhaps for the unthematizable Other calling through a language that does not belong to anybody.290 Despite the freedom bequeathed by language, this offering does not necessarily entail control over a world endowed with meaning. However, it can be received with a pious gesture to bring to the surface the sedimented meanings of a language that cannot be called one’s own, since it is the language in which one partakes. The language through which to understand the world is thus not propelled by the Kraft einer Überzeugung, but it actually serves as the force propelling the endless conversation that ensues when one acknowledges the voice of others and transforms hearing (hören) into belonging (zuhören).291 Character as an idiosyncratic and biased language hints at the hermeneutic movement: “Die Bewegung der Sprache ist für ihn spekulativ, weil alles Gesagte in seiner Endlichkeit die Unendlichkeit des Nicht-Gesagten widerspiegelt, in seiner Grenze auf den Horizont eines Unendlichen verweist.”292 All available narrative threads tempting Tristram to follow them, all the interstices bridged by a perspectival line, and all the discontinuities discovered by Ulrich during his walks allude to the yet-to-be-articulated. The endless conversation must be interrupted and, like all Shandean conversations, resumed in a new direction and with another voice, another “you” that adds its own misconceptions and misunderstandings to the progression towards understanding.293 In this framework of an intersub|| 290 “Die hermeneutische Erfahrung selbst ist genau die umgekehrte: eine fremde Sprache erlernt haben und verstehen – dieser Formalismus des Könnens –, heißt nichts als: in der Lage sein, das in ihr Gesagte sich gesagt sein zu lassen. Die Ausübung dieses Verstehens ist immer schon Inanspruchnahme durch das Gesagte, und eine solche kann es nicht geben, ohne daß man ‘seine eigene Welt-, ja seine eigene Sprachansicht’ mit einsetzt.” Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, 446. 291 Donatella Di Cesare, “Das unendliche Gespräch. Sprache als Medium der hermeneutischen Erfahrung (GW 1, 387–441)”, in Hans-Georg Gadamer. Wahrheit…, ed. Günter Figal, 184. 292 Di Cesare, “Das unendliche Gespräch”, 185. For the relation between hearing and belonging, see 184. 293 “Im Anschluß an Heideggers Gedanken, demzufolge das Verstehen der ursprüngliche Vollzug des Daseins ist, behauptet Gadamer, daß ‘Einverständnis [...] ursprünglicher als Mißverständnis’ ist (GW 2, 187; Gadamer 1993h, 359). Es handelt sich weder um einen billigen Optimismus noch um die Formulierung einer ethischen Aufgabe. Vielmehr wird hier die Praxis des Sprechens und Verstehens phänomenologisch beschrieben. Das ursprüngliche Verstehen ist nichts anderes als der Einklang der gemeinsamen Sprache, die Gemeinsamkeit stiftet. Wer eine Sprache spricht, noch bevor er einstimmt, stimmt dadurch zu, daß er seine Stimme derjenigen der Anderen anstimmt, und sein Selbst in die bedeutenden Laute der gemeinsamen Sprache artikuliert. Sein Sprechen ist daher ein ‘Übereinkommen’. In diesem Sinn interpretiert Gadamer die synthike des Aristoteles.” Di Cesare, “Das unendliche Gespräch”, 190.

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jective rationality, exegesis is performed in such way that there might be a moment of agreement. There is a Being in the language that can be understood, but understanding does not deplete Being.294 Since it is impossible to drain or filter language as a source of being to acquire a drop of its deepest, densest and almost immovable substance, Gadamer reinstates the concept of authority to regain a compass. Authority is not submission, but acknowledgement and knowledge of another’s judgment, which can only be earned.295 With help from the concept of authority, one can deal with the prejudices that are part of the world’s precomprenhension. At the same time, one can legitimize the findings of the hermeneutic experience without resorting to a rationalist concept of knowledge.296 In this process, one needs to acknowledge different perspectives, allow one’s language to be used without being assimilated through a translation springing from self-assertion. This feature not only sheds some light on Essayismus and the digressive novel, but takes us back to the first part of the investigation and Butler’s relational ethics. A biographical account with a saturated intertextuality not only implies a character constructed in harmony with relational ethics, but also grounds its own authority. Relational ethics is grounded in a conception of language that underscores its independence from a presupposed principle.297 Das bedeutet, daß Autorität, hermeneutisch gefaßt, in der Dauer ihres Geltungsanspruches grundsätzlich intersubjektiven Verständigungsprozessen unterworfen ist und d.h. prinzipiell nur auf Widerruf und mit dem Anspruch auf immer neue Bewährung zuerkannt wird. Ihrer Struktur nach relational legitimiert sich Autorität durch ihre in eine Kommunikationsgemeinschaft eingebrachte und darin prinzipiell einsehbare Kompetenz.298

In both novels, the similitude and associations ground the hermeneutic understanding of the other, but this can only be achieved through movement. The characters expressing and, in the case of Tristram, defining their ethos through

|| 294 Di Cesare, “Das unendliche Gespräch”, 191, 186–187. 295 Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, 284. 296 “[E]in rationalistischer Erkenntnisbegriff, der nicht mit der geschichtlichen Bedingtheit seines eigenen Ansatzes rechnet, ist in der Tat blind für die hermeneutische Forderung, die Vor-Struktur als ontologisch positiven Befund der menschlichen Erkenntnis anzuerkennen.” Gander, “Erhebung der Geschichtlichkeit des Verstehens”, 111. 297 “Die Sprache, die die Dinge führen, ist nicht der logos ousias und vollendet sich nicht in der Selbstanschauung eines unendlichen Intellekts – sie ist die Sprache, die unser endlichgeschichtliches Wesen vernimmt, wenn wir sprechen lernen.” Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, 480. 298 Gander, “Erhebung der Geschichtlichkeit des Verstehens”, 118.

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narrative enacts the dynamic process whereby the affinities and similitudes happen, where cross-infections between semantic fields and misunderstandings create a common ground for a moment. So the question here is not “innerhalb einer geschichtlichen Gemeinsamkeit die Individualität als solche zu verstehen, sondern das Verstehen als jene Weise zu betrachten, in der sich diese Gemeinsamkeit ereignet.”299

|| 299 Luca Crescenzi, “Fragwürdigkeit der romantischen Hermeneutik und ihrer Anwendung auf die Historik (GW 1, 177–222)”, in Hans-Georg Gadamer. Wahrheit, ed. Günter Figal, 82.

3 Character Construction as Relational Difference 3.1 Becoming a figure of thought This investigation concludes with some reflections on moral character, in order to outline three salient issues relating to generalizations, namely, predictions made on the basis of our knowledge of somebody’s character; the boundaries of this inquisitive gaze into another’s ethos; and the localizable but evanescent origins of a character trait. These considerations, though rooted in a long tradition of poetics that leads back to Aristotle, spring from the claim that, in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften but mainly in Tristram Shandy, character construction as an abstract form constraining the iterations of reason represents an immanent approach to the other. This approach should be construed as a figure of thought that proposes a method, in other words, a reflective movement that allows us to delve into the differences of any iteration and remain skeptical, or better said, remain open to new experiences so as to become a good judge of character. Although Musil’s novel hints at various features of this approach, it seems to be a latent alternative which does not acquire the same weight as in Sterne’s novel. For this reason, I will draw from some passages of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften to reiterate how Musil developed the problematic to which Sterne advanced a possible solution: an alternative method for tackling rationality together with the pervasive irony of modernity without resorting to the mystical experience or the epic. The focus on character construction as an endless task is what conciliates a narrative program with a form. But this form does not tackle the transcendental distinction between object and subject. Instead, this structuralist matrix establishes certainty in its own terms by mixing factual and ideal ingredients in a biographical account; it transforms the situation of address by employing judicial eloquence to undermine common sense and catch a glimpse of an immanent principle of intelligibility. This attempt, as we have seen in the first part of this investigation, shatters like an illusion and is downgraded to a justification. For judges and jury, such an account advances questionable statements, motives so idiosyncratic that cannot be considered as the force fueling the true intentions of an action. They only depict a perspective that makes one wonder either as to the sanity of an accused who might not be able to deliberate, or a society which has created an environment that brews iniquities. In order to bypass this deadlock, the alternative was to abandon a commonsense perspective built upon observable materials and delve into inner life with

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110656947-004

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the aid of imagination. As argued in the second part of this investigation, this way of understanding the other relinquishes self-legitimization and selfsufficiency as tools for defining agency. Rather, it constructs autonomy by manipulating traditional stylistic devices endowed with authority, in the sense of acknowledgement of someone’s ability to judge situationally. Such a method implies that there is no vantage point that could provide stable footing for certainty. All possibilities should be weighed against each other regardless of whether or not they form part of actual events. Contingency becomes more important than necessity. Even the implausible, as well as fairy tales and adventure stories, will shed light on our modal understanding of what should, would, or ought to have happened. Mental life is defined by the experience of the manifoldness of the world, a varied palette of modes of interpretation. Truth and the Other are only approachable through partial truths linked to explanation modes. This stance implies an unthematizable core and skepticism about other minds. It leads to digressions that might help outline an ethos, but never define it completely, since digressions are not the “wiping of a looking glass” (III, Preface 227–228). They only help to advance predictions about acts that will never be narrated. If one aims at postulating an ethos and interacting accordingly, one needs to resort to a sense of style that embraces a perspective reduction as one’s own and closes the gaps in reality to create continuity. This manner of orientating oneself can be extrapolated to fulfill the demands of an intersubjective world and delineate a Menschenkenntnis that helps us to ground interaction but also to handle oneself as another. One is confronted with the continuous effort to steer way from abstractions and ground life in the concrete, which has been poetically internalized and claimed. Narrating is the only way to legitimize and experiment with individual poetics fueled by an ethos that, like a perpetual motion machine, runs towards the concretion of either an analytic-dissolving or accumulative-merging immanent principle. This immanent principle is not defined by an origin, but by continuous transformations nourished by diverse genres and styles and by a plurality of centers whose superimposed points of view blur the world’s well-defined contours. They reveal minimal differences that undermine any all-embracing concept or principle. Therein lies the difference of this relational ethics revolving around character construction; in “forms”, defined as mental activity, that advance representations and simultaneously model the mind. In this sense, every representational matrix can reach monadic proportions – as evinced by the Moosbrugger complex – or aspire to become a work of art, an autonomous oeuvre:

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La représentation infinie a beau multiplier les points de vue, et les organiser en séries ; ces séries n'en sont pas moins soumises à la condition de converger sur un même objet, sur un même monde. […] Il ne suffit pas de multiplier les perspectives pour faire du perspectivisme. Il faut qu'à chaque perspective ou point de vue corresponde une œuvre autonome, ayant un sens suffisant : ce qui compte est la divergence des séries, le décentrement des cercles, le ‘monstre’. L’ensemble des cercles et des séries est donc un chaos informel, effondé, qui n’a pas d’autre ‘loi’ que sa propre répétition, sa reproduction dans le développement de ce qui diverge et décentre.1

The character constellation in both novels allows us to differentiate perspectives, but it is actually by means of repetition that a personality is posited. To see how somebody stays in character is to be acquainted with the series generated by habit and that allow one to speak about the Shandean hobbyhorse as a simulacrum without beginning nor end.2 The hobbyhorsical repetitions allow an observer to build a compound of generalizations based on behaviour, even construe somebody as a Gleichnis or a “living generalization” in osmosis with cultural and physical surroundings from which they draw notions to render the world intelligible. Tristram’s journey through fragments of learning is his biographical account of the cruel accidents that left an impression on his body and mind. It is a story that never grants him a moment of rest, neither in the past nor in a present rife with accidents related to his writing and defining his narrative. For him, the writing process represents a situation in which his mind is indefinitely under siege by its cultural surroundings and by the thoughts that come to it in an almost natural way. His writing style, built through time, has become second nature, part of his personality, so that his mind is an artificial product of symbolic and physical dismembering, mended – instead of dressed – with dissimilar fabrics and provided with theoretical crutches to compensate for its shortcomings. With his singular stride, Tristram explores the world. This means that, to orientate himself within a five-mile-radius of chaos, he must identify and reidentify at least some objects in the scenery. Although a regular behaviour might suffice to establish an order, it is not until regularity becomes a habit that

|| 1 Gilles Deleuze, Différence et répétition, 94. 2 Deleuze defines the simulacra thusly: “Le simulacre est l’instance qui comprend une différence en soi, comme (au moins) deux séries divergentes sur lesquelles il joue, toute ressemblance abolie, sans qu’on puisse dès lors indiquer l’existence d’un original et d’une copie. C’est dans cette direction qu’il faut chercher les conditions, non plus de l’expérience possible, mais de l’expérience réelle (sélection, répétition, etc.). C’est là que nous trouvons la réalité vécue d’un domaine sub-représentatif.” Deleuze, Différence et répétition, 95.

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law-like claims mimicking the laws of nature appear. In other words, perhaps the passage from regularity to habit happens when the latter seeks to become moral law or second nature by establishing a balance between endowing an action with a definite meaning and its application in diverse contexts.3 On the other hand, the construction of a moral character as the basis of our efforts to understand this second nature entails a skeptical position regarding mental causation, certainty about other minds, and the private mental theatre. Although one should only rely on observable behaviour and avoid any ascription of mental phenomena, motives are still within our grasp – but through the detour of dispositional concepts. Instead of talking about Kraft einer Überzeugung or impulses, one can avoid anything resembling “para-mechanical myths” and resort to “semi-hypothetical statements” to tackle regularity in behavior.4 By subsuming the narrative intricacies exemplifying a disposition under the notion of moral character, one can posit a gravitational center for these semihypothetical statements, that is, a sense of style that alludes to a whole but not to the necessity to achieve it by filling in the gaps. However, sense of style and ethos do not only converge in a writing style, but also in gesticulations that, when repeated, characterize a personality. In a fortuitous encounter, a gesture might strike us as unusual and, after some time, become a riddle haunting our memory. By contrast, an acquaintance’s characteristic gesticulation is identifiable after a couple of repetitions and might even appear as a tick. Unrelated movements become a series and lure us into subsuming a hand tremor or a wink under a concept. We can order our thoughts by starting from the Same – which might ease our minds and give us room to reflect on other matters – , but there are different ways to construe repetition. On the one hand, it can bring about the Same, so the differences in every iteration can be skimmed from the top of a concept, as if they were a neglectable surplus; on the other hand, repetition can also serve to reflect upon the Self, the singular subject who repeats a gesture that is the same but never identical in a unified spatio-temporal framework. If strict identity is denied and difference is not a

|| 3 Deleuze, Différence et répétition, 11. 4 Ryle, The Concept of Mind, 99. “Sentences embodying these dispositional words have been interpreted as being categorical reports of particular but unwitnessable matters of fact instead of being testable, open hypothetical and what I shall call ‘semi-hypothetical’ statements. The old error of treating the term ‘Force’ as denoting an occult force-exerting agency has been given up in the physical sciences, but its relatives survive in many theories of mind and are perhaps only moribund in biology.” (101)

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surplus to the concept, then it can be thought of as interior to the idea, as the gravitational center that posits an immanent principle, “le Soi de la répétition.”5 Now, if one does not try to ground actions in the discovery of this Self but seeks – as this investigation has intended all along – to understand somebody, then the Self with which we are dealing here is the Self that remains in the promise and can fulfil it despite any change in views and values, as, Ricœur claims. This is a creative and also unthematizable Self that cannot be reduced to a concept but stands for: “le point de perspective privilégié sur le monde, qu’est chaque sujet parlant, est la limite du monde en non un de ses contenus.”6 Operating as a perspective and boundary of the world, the Self behaves as a reflective pronoun, a speech act and voice that identifies its environs by positing a framework, but steers away from solipsism. In relation to ethos, the Self does not represent an utterance demarcating an origin, but a habit and “ma manière d’exister selon une perspective finie affectant mon ouverture sur le monde des choses, des idées, des valeurs, des personnes.”7 Repetition can ground a habit and make available a spatio-temporal framework. It constructs continuity by positing an identifiable repetition, for instance, a gesture that is repeated but never the same because it is not opposed to its previous performances. Only some definable traits can be said to be repeated, just enough features to ground the identification of repetitions and to hint at the difference, at the further meanings beyond the concept.8 A gesture that presents itself as the same is || 5 Deleuze, Différence et répétition, 36. “Nous sommes en droit de parler de répétition, quand nous nous trouvons devant des éléments identiques ayant absolument le même concept. Mais de ces éléments discrets, de ces objets répétés, nous devons distinguer un sujet secret qui se répète à travers eux, véritable sujet de la répétition. Il faut penser la répétition au pronominal, trouver le Soi de la répétition, la singularité dans ce qui se répète. Car il n’y a pas de répétition sans un répétiteur, rien de répété sans âme répétitrice. Aussi bien, plutôt que le répété et le répétiteur, l’objet et le sujet, nous devons distinguer deux formes de répétition. De toute manière, la répétition est la différence sans concept. Mais dans un cas, la différence est seulement posée comme extérieure au concept, différence entre objets représentés sous le même concept, tombant dans l’indifférence de l’espace et du temps. Dans l’autre cas, la différence est intérieure à l’Idée ; elle se déploie comme pur mouvement créateur d’un espace et d’un temps dynamiques qui correspondent à l’Idée. La première répétition est répétition du Même, qui s’explique par l’identité du concept ou de la représentation ; la seconde est celle qui comprend la différence, et se comprend elle-même dans l’altérité de l’Idée, dans l’hétérogénéité d’une ‘apprésentation’.” 6 Ricœur, Soi-même comme un autre, 67. 7 Ricœur, Soi-même comme un autre, 145. 8 “Nous devons alors reconnaître l’existence de différences non conceptuelles entre ces objets. C’est Kant qui marqua le mieux la corrélation entre des concepts doués d’une spécification seulement indéfinie et des déterminations non conceptuelles, purement spatio-temporelles ou

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attired with a difference beyond its concept, a difference related to its performance. If one considers moral character as the core of this gesture, then moral character can only be construed as a malleable figure of thought whose extremes – beginning and end – cannot be defined nor pinpointed. Moral character is not a concept; its different expressions can be expected but not foretold, since moral character stands for a dispositional complex that might, but never ought to lead to an actualization. Ulrich’s and Tristram’s mental sway hinges on a form that provides a scaffold for their imagination. Both rely on a matrix that establishes a fundamental regularity which, despite the contents or the discourses chosen for their explanation, still accompanies their thoughts. This form is neither given nor is it the result of a constituted moral character. It is posited as a series that turns into habit. Its origins are not in memory nor in understanding but in a contraction of the imagination, that is, a passive synthesis that represents.9 This arbitrary thrust entailed in the “know-how” of orientation is the “present vivant” that is made not by, but within the spirit. It precedes memory and reflection, since it is concomitant with contemplation and grounded in repetition, in a gesture that becomes a habit, or is identified as an action that belongs to a case.10 Character as a form brought about by habit with enough leeway to include difference beyond a subsuming concept is comparable to a “généralité vivante” in which the internal opposition between simple elements like A, A, A, is defined by the binary opposition between AB, AB, … and vice versa.11 In other words:

|| oppositionnelles (paradoxe des objets symétriques). Mais précisément ces déterminations sont seulement les figures de la répétition : l’espace et le temps sont eux-mêmes des milieux répétitifs ; et l’opposition réelle n’est pas un maximum de différence, mais un minimum de répétition, une répétition réduite à deux, faisant retour et écho sur soi, une répétition qui a trouvé le moyen de se définir. La répétition apparaît donc comme la différence sans concept, qui se dérobe à la différence conceptuelle indéfiniment continuée.” Deleuze, Différence et répétition, 23. 9 Deleuze, Différence et répétition, 96–97. 10 Deleuze, Différence et répétition, 97, 103. 11 “Sans doute l’exemple de Bergson n’est-il pas le même que celui de Hume. L’un désigne une répétition fermée, l’autre, ouverte. De plus, l’un désigne une répétition d’éléments du type A A A A (tic, tic, tic, tic,), l’autre, une répétition de cas, AB AB AB A ... (tic-tac, tic-tac, tic-tac, tic ...). La principale distinction de ces formes repose sur ceci : dans la seconde la différence n’apparaît pas seulement dans la contraction des éléments en général, elle existe aussi dans chaque cas particulier, entre deux éléments déterminés et réunis par un rapport d’opposition. La fonction de l’opposition, ici, est de limiter en droit la répétition élémentaire, de la fermer sur le groupe le plus simple, de la réduire au minimum de deux (le tac étant un tic inversé). La différence semble donc abandonner sa première figure de généralité, se distribue

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Quand nous disons que l’habitude soutire à la répétition quelque chose de nouveau : la différence (d’abord posée comme généralité). L’habitude dans son essence est contraction. […] Telle est la synthèse passive, qui constitue notre habitude de vivre, c’est-à-dire notre attente que ‘cela’ continue, qu’un des deux éléments survienne après l’autre, assurant la perpétuation de notre cas.12

But the case Deleuze talks about is far from the idea of a self-assertion incessantly extending its domain by attempting to assimilate everything through representations based on fundamental principles. Instead, it embraces mutations triggered by dismembering knowledge: “Nous sommes toujours Actéon par ce que nous contemplons, bien que nous soyons Narcisse par le plaisir que nous en tirons. Contempler, c’est soutirer. C’est toujours autre chose, c’est l’eau, Diane ou les bois qu’il faut d'abord contempler, pour se remplir d’une image de soi-même.”13 The généralité vivante characterizes moral character as a figure of thought that is grounded in the mental activity of representation and at the same time in the difference that hinders any attempt to consider a series as closed, or a case as ultimately defined by a concept. Moral character is thus not only a semihypothesis but an ever-changing and unattainable generalization. With its habits, it unfolds a case that is grounded in the differences it cannot include, and still, this figure of thought never renounces its promise of difference. Thanks to the hermeneutic dialectics of sedimentation and innovation at its core,14 this figure of thought acknowledges the address of the Other that cannot be enclosed in a concept.15 Thematizing leads to stagnation, so to avoid falling prey to a determining discourse, the novels rely on a discursive movement and posit a form which could – if provided with an unquenchable energy source – continue its story-telling always with the same rhythm. || dans le particulier qui se répète, mais pour susciter de nouvelles généralités vivantes. La répétition se trouve enfermée dans le ‘cas’, réduite à deux, mais s’ouvre un nouvel infini qui est la répétition des cas eux-mêmes. Il serait donc faux de croire que toute répétition de cas est par nature ouverte, comme toute répétition d’éléments, fermée. La répétition des cas n’est ouverte qu’en passant par la fermeture d’une opposition binaire entre éléments ; inversement la répétition des éléments n’est fermée qu’en renvoyant à des structures de cas dans lesquelles elle joue elle-même dans son ensemble le rôle d’un des deux éléments opposes : …” Deleuze, Différence et répétition, 98–99. 12 Deleuze, Différence et répétition, 101. 13 Deleuze, Différence et répétition, 102 14 Ricœur, Temps et récit, 129–135. 15 Emmanuel Lévinas, Totalität und Unendlichkeit (München: Alber, 1987), 109, 277–278. The Other as an unthematizable infinite reveals itself, according to Levinas, in the phenomenological situation of face-to-face.

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Rhythm unfolds a regularity that escapes the purview of inductive understanding and paves the way for a method of approaching the généralité vivante through hermeneutics. For this purpose, Gadamer recommends developing our “Taktgefühl”, which relies on our judgment on sense, taste and sentiment.16 Knowing how to follow a rhythm should reveal how, in a Deleuzian formulation, the tick-tock came to be what it is. This feeling for rhythm should be cultivated. In other words, Bildung is what one needs if one wishes to acquire what Musil calls a sense of style, which respects the past without striving to be in total harmony with its cadences. Bildung is the formation Tristram received in Shandy Hall and which gave rise to his hermeneutic associative consciousness. But Bildung does not represent a guiding principle nor an ability. As defined by Humboldt, it is a mental process that must be trained and nourished to delve into the forms behind the images of the world.17 This training allows one to respond to a text as if it were a unique event. In this encounter with a text or language, a person is enmeshed in a situation to which he responds with his presuppositions and affects. In return, the person is also affected by the event, so understanding becomes a never-ending task, in which one continuously verifies

|| 16 Gadamer assumes a position close to the English moral philosophers, argues Arnd Kerkhecker, “Bedeutung der humanistischen Tradition für die Geisteswissenschaften (GW 1, 9– 47)”, in Hans-Georg Gadamer. Wahrheit und Methode, ed. Günter Figal (Berlin: Akademie, 2007), 16–17, 23–25. 17 “Der Aufstieg des Wortes Bildung erweckt vielmehr die alte mystische Tradition, wonach der Mensch das Bild Gottes, nach dem er geschaffen ist, in seiner Seele trägt und in sich aufzubauen hat. Das lateinische Äquivalent für Bildung ist ‘formatio’ und dem entspricht in anderen Sprachen, z. B. im Englischen (bei Shaftesbury) form und formation. Auch im Deutschen liegen die entsprechenden Ableitungen des Begriffs der forma, z. B. Formierung und Formation, mit dem Worte Bildung lange in Konkurrenz. Forma wird seit dem Aristotelismus der Renaissance von seiner technischen Bedeutung ganz gelöst und rein dynamisch naturhaft interpretiert. Gleichwohl erscheint der Sieg des Wortes ‘Bildung’ über ‘Form’ nicht zufällig. Denn in ‘Bildung’ steckt ‘Bild’. Der Formbegriff bleibt hinter der geheimnisvollen Doppelseitigkeit zurück, mit der ‘Bild’ Nachbild und Vorbild zugleich umfaßt. Es entspricht nun einer häufigen Übertragung des Werdens auf das Sein, daß ‘Bildung’ (wie auch das heutige ‘Formation’), mehr das Resultat dieses Werdevorganges als den Vorgang selbst bezeichnet. Die Übertragung ist hier besonders einsichtig, weil ja das Resultat der Bildung nicht in der Weise der technischen Abzweckung hergestellt wird, sondern dem inneren Vorgang der Formierung und Bildung entwächst und deshalb in ständiger Fort- und Weiterbildung bleibt. Nicht zufällig gleicht das Wort Bildung darin dem griechischen physis. Bildung kennt, so wenig wie die Natur, außerhalb ihrer gelegene Ziele.” Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, 16–17.

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one’s stance through Bildung and relies on phronesis, in the sense of an applied form of knowledge, for his reactions.18 Every reaction and behavior can be added to an array that would lead to a comprehensive apprehension of the other, to discovering their pace and rhythm. Every item, as soon as it becomes meaningful, postulates a preliminary whole, a draft that always demands revision19 but projects, in an instant, the sense of uniformity from a rendering consciousness.20 Hence, we are dealing with a character in the process of constructing a character and trying to apprehend an “I” as a “You.” This incessant and encroaching double movement, which is particularly evident in Tristram Shandy, is grounded in the epistemology of hermeneutics and its claim on universality. In other words, it is grounded in a “sich in universaler Weise wandelnden und perpetuierenden Sinnerfahrung.”21 This conforming experience posits continuity by mediating the antagonism between history and tradition through the inner difference between perspectives. This difference that creates disruption is a structural feature that draws our attention to the nature of a conversation. We cannot control or conduct a conversation, but we find ourselves suddenly in the middle of a language in which different discourses move.22 Intertextuality defines the scope and boundaries of each voice and, at the same time, reveals that blurred and unreachable origins only allow us to speak about a stance.23 One finds oneself in the middle of an event to which one can only respond with the ability to understand within a language so vast that it is impossible to postulate a whole or totality.24 And still,

|| 18 For the ideas advanced here, see Friederike Rese, “Phronesis als Modell der Hermeneutik. Die hermeneutische Aktualität des Aristoteles (GW 1, 312–329)”, in Hans-Georg Gadamer. Wahrheit und Methode, ed. Günter Figal (Berlin: Akademie, 2007), 138, 140, 144–145. 19 Gander, “Erhebung der Geschichtlichkeit des Verstehens…”, 106. 20 Cassirer, Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, 35. 21 Michael Steinmann, “Auf dem Weg zu einer modernen Epistemologie. Diltheys Verstrickungen in die Aporien des Historismus; Überwindung der erkenntnistheoretischen Fragestellung durch die phänomenologische Forschung (GW 1, 222–269)”, in Hans-Georg Gadamer. Wahrheit und Methode, ed. Günter Figal (Berlin: Akademie, 2007), 102. 22 Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, 387–393. 23 “Mit der Verfeinerung der Haltung, die es ihm erlaubt, Texte zu interpretieren, gelangt der Interpret hingegen nicht an ein Ende. Denn diese beruht, ebenso wie die Tugend der praktischen Vernünftigkeit (phronesis), welche es dem Handelnden erlaubt, eine Handlungssituation zu beurteilen, auf Erfahrung (empeiria).” Rese, “Phronesis als Modell der Hermeneutik”, 146. 24 Here, “whole” refers to language as the being that can be understood. However, when we speak we simply define a manner of relating to the world that can be interpreted. “Die Vernunft ist so wenig wie die Sprache eine fertige und geschlossene Totalität. Beiden ist es gemeinsam,

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there is no deficiency in an edifice of thought that delves into constraints and leads to dismemberment: Although some would say that to be a split subject, or a subject whose access to itself is forever opaque, incapable of self-grounding, is precisely not to have the grounds for agency and the conditions for accountability, the way in which we are, from the start, interrupted by alterity may render us incapable of offering narrative closure for our lives. The purpose here is not to celebrate a certain notion of incoherence, but only to point out that our ‘‘incoherence’’ establishes the way in which we are constituted in relationality: implicated, beholden, derived, sustained by a social world that is beyond us and before us.25

3.2 Glassy, waxy, and colloidal essences The topic of this subchapter is “our incoherence” or, in other words, mind and body relations in Musil’s and Sterne’s novels, and how to give an account of them. It is the first of three subchapters on the idea of character construction as an approach to a “living generalization.” The point of departure is Richard Rorty’s conception of glassy essence, which offers a counterexample for the discussion and transformation of literary notions: Our Glassy Essence was not a philosophical doctrine, but a picture which literate men found presupposed by every page they read. It is glassy—mirror-like—for two reasons. First, it takes on new forms without being changed—but intellectual forms, rather than sensible ones as material mirrors do. Second, mirrors are made of a substance which is purer, finer grained, more subtle, and more delicate than most. Unlike our spleen, which, in combination with other equally gross and visible organs, accounted for the bulk of our behavior, our Glassy Essence is something we share with the angels, even though they weep for our ignorance of its nature. […] Our Glassy Essence—the “intellectual soul” of the scholastics—is also Bacon’s “mind of man” which “far from the nature of a clear and equal glass, wherein the beams of things should reflect according to their true incidence … is rather like an enchanted glass, full of superstition and imposture, if it be not delivered and reduced.”26

|| daß sie das Ganze des Seins nicht in seiner Gegenwärtigkeit umfassen können. Als eine menschliche, und d. h. immer auch endliche, ist die Vernunft auf die Einheit eines Ganzen immer nur hingewendet, und eben deshalb eignet ihr die gleiche unabschließbare Offenheit wie auch der Sprache.” Barbaric, “Die Grenzen zum Unsagbaren”, 210. For the ideas discussed here see also 204, 208. 25 Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 64. 26 Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 41–42. The original order of the fragments is inverted here.

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An image that is in the same way available for everybody to inspect might lead all observers to identify the same possible goals and way of achieving them. Minds reflect forms and produce representations without losing the essential abstract regularity on which the homogeneity and harmony of their images of the world is based. Hence, the issue at hand is the nature of this glassy essence. Whether we receive pristine mental images to be dissected or singularly distorted images depends on it. In both cases, intellect “is both mirror and eye in one.”27 Unique images might be grounded in immanence and lead to a hylomorphic approach shared by Sterne’s and Musil’s novels, an approach that revolves around “a conception according to which knowledge is not the possession of accurate representations of an object but rather the subject’s becoming identical with the object.”28 However, to become identical, for Tristram and Ulrich, is not to rely on the natural thinking that is supposed to be the straight and right way to think. Instead, this becoming identical with the object demands a change of focus towards deviations and difference, and its fate is to become pure passage. Although the human body in Tristram Shandy is defined by regularity and is often characterized as a machine whose differently sized gears are fueled by a hobbyhorsical principle, friction and inconsistencies become evident when one steps back to gain a broader perspective over this social automaton: Though in one sense, our family was certainly a simple machine, as it consisted of a few wheels; yet there was thus much to be said for it, that these wheels were set in motion by so many different springs, and acted one upon the other from such a variety of strange principles and impulses——that though it was a simple machine, it had all the honour and advantages of a complex one,——and a number of as odd movements within it, as ever were beheld in the inside of a Dutch silk-mill. (V, vi 427)

The complex machine composed of the Shandy family is far from being a perfectly tuned device. The teeth of the gears might engage with each other, but do not interlock frictionlessly. Their interactions are stuttering and sometimes compete with each other because these gears do not have a common goal towards which to machine their way through. So despite its undeniable motion, this machine has problems with the power transmission between wheels: their springs and impulses might obstruct their cooperation, or at least bring the machine to sputter, stammer and falter. In short, the mechanical body serves to thematize the balance and the workings of physical systems as well as to insert

|| 27 Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 45. 28 Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 45.

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the body therein, but, at the same time, these machines have “odd movements within” that reveal a different intention. For Tristram, the mechanical analogies do not measure up to the inner complexities and movements of life, so he decides to take a stance in front of his traditions and criticize his father’s renunciation and one-sided oversimplification of feelings and the sensuous.29 Instead of adhering to Walter’s theory and subsuming different internal phenomena under the figure of the ass, that is, Buridian’s abulic beast that follows the whims of its appetite, Tristram prefers to posit a gentle mount with needs and feelings as an allegory for human nature. For him, the body also thinks: “Reason is, half of it, Sense; and the measure of heaven itself is but the measure of our present appetites and concoctions” (VII, xiii, 593). To deny the body’s role in every reflection is to presuppose that only linear thinking is the right way to think, the natural way of thinking to which everybody should adhere. But Tristram does not believe in the primacy of geometry in human matters, which does not imply an outright relativism. It is rather an invitation to emulate Yorick and become “centaur-like”, to understand one’s own passions and to take as a premise the idea that “When a man, thus represented, tells you in any particular instance,——That such a thing goes against his conscience,——always believe he means exactly the same thing, as when he tells you such a thing goes against his stomach” (II, xvii, 164). Taste and sense of style grow into us with habit and, together with opinions, they have a sensuous component, which makes enjoyable the process of rendering the world intelligible by means of the hobbyhorse. They also have a corporeal component that not only gives form to thoughts but is formed by them. “Knowledge changes you” is perhaps the conviction that Tristram attains after reconstructing his past and discovering that his history is defined by dismemberment. This idea refers to Actaeon’s myth, which represents an enduring epistemological allegory that can be traced back to G. Bruno’s philosophy. Some

|| 29 “It pleased my father well; it was not only a laconick way of expressing——but of libelling, at the same time, the desires and appetites of the lower part of us; so that for many years of my father’s life, ’twas his constant mode of expression—he never used the word passions once— but ass always instead of them——So that he might be said truly, to have been upon the bones, or the back of his own ass, or else of some other man’s, during all that time. I must here observe to you the difference betwixt My father’s ass and my hobby-horse—in order to keep characters as separate as may be, in our fancies as we go along. For my hobby-horse, if you recollect a little, is no way a vicious beast; he has scarce one hair or lineament of the ass about him—” (VIII, xxxi, 716)

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remarks on the Nolan’s reflections will help us link multi-perspectivism, immanence, and mind and body relations to the present argument. While the static image that we see of ourselves might bring us narcissistic delight or be distorted by any minimal currents triggering a mise-en-abyme and making us aware of our own gaze and otherness; in the myth of Actaeon one is confronted with divinity from which knowledge springs.30 We no longer linger in front of a pond but habitually hunt, until we have the opportunity to espy Diana, be seen by her and transformed by this intellectual experience without merging with the divine.31 Accidentally discovering Diana under the moonlight transforms you and turns your own heuristics against you, as if they were hounds whose analytic jaws must inevitably tear you apart. The hero’s destiny is thus dismemberment and new constraints from which to understand oneself, but only thanks to the penetrating moonlight and the manner in which we receive such a light.32 Contemplation is what allows us not only to attain but also to embody knowledge, a knowledge that depends on our potential to undergo an intellectual and affective change, to open mind and heart to Diana’s arrows.33 Mind and body relations are thus defined by the interaction between the arrows of light and the matter they pierce. For instance, a ray of light diving through the sky into the sea makes its depths visible but does not raise the abyssal temperatures; the || 30 In this context, it is interesting to consider that according to the mystical tradition for god, seeing and creating is the same, and so is being seen by a third in his creations. To see a god is to be seen or created/transformed by it. This is the link between anderen Zustand and the solution to irrationality through character construction. Wagner-Egelhaaf, Mystik der Moderne, 12. 31 Giordano Bruno, Des fureurs Héroïques, Œuvres complètes VI, intr. and notes M. A. Granada, trad. Paul-Henri Michel and reviewed by Yves Hersant, text established by Giovanni Aquilecchia (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1999), 326. This characterization of the hero in relation to Acteon’s myth is evident if one bears in mind the quote from L. Spruit that Miguel Angel Granada refers to in a note to a study from L. Spruit. For Spruit, it is crucial—as it is for the present argument—that the hero does not seek to merge with the divinity: “in quel momento vedere significa esser visto. Quest’ultima espressione si trova anche in Bruno […] ma egli localizza il raptus ad un livello inferiore rispetto a Plotino. In Bruno non si verifica una visio Unius ma una transformatio sui in rem, ossia : una visio Dianae. Successivamente questo livello della conoscenza, nel quale soggetto ed oggetto coincidono, viene assimilato da Bruno al mondo intelligibile plotiniano; e ciò conformemente al suo pensiero nel De la causa, dove già abbiamo potuto constatare che egli assegnava gli attributi classici di questo stesso mondo intelligible all’universo infinito.” Leen Spruit, Il problema della conoscenza in Giordano Bruno (Napoli: Bibliopolis, 1988), 272, in Bruno, Des fureurs Héroїques, 575 note 54. 32 Bruno, Des fureurs Héroїques, 341. 33 Bruno, Des fureurs Héroїques, 345.

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glass of water is transparent to the light and the temperature of its contents might change, but the glass stays the same; and the mirror maintains its forms and only reflects.34 Such an imagery draws attention to modes of being and their reactions to heat and light. They bring us back to the glassy essence and remind us of the protean individuals postulated in Musil’s novel, who never speak of the same. But Tristram and Ulrich remain silent regarding a transcendental position. Every character could be said to speak in similitudes. There is not an eidetic core around which their variations revolve, but an immanent motor.35 Sterne reflects on the bearings of the glassy essence on the biographical account with the help of Momus’ recommendation to the Creator: If the fixture of Momus’s glass in the human breast, according to the proposed emendation of that arch-critick, had taken place, […] had the said glass been there set up, nothing more would have been wanting, in order to have taken a man’s character, but to have taken a chair and gone softly, as you would to a dioptrical beehive, and look’d in,—view’d the soul stark naked;—observed all her motions,—her machinations;—traced all her maggots from their first engendering to their crawling forth;—watched her loose in her frisks, her gambols, her capricios; and after some notice of her more solemn deportment, consequent upon such frisks, &c.——then taken your pen and ink and set down nothing but what you had seen, and could have sworn to: […] (TS I, xxiii, 82–83)

At first glance, a glass-breasted humanity could interact with ease. Mental phenomena would become observable and one could gain first-hand knowledge and certainty about another’s intentions. However, a closer look into this glassy person’s entrails would reveal, not a singular and definite naked form, but a panoply of moving particles, like bees going about their work. These ideas are in different stages of their development and will inevitably die. Maggots represent incipient ideas, but they are also reminders of how the flesh ends. But all the same, these inhabitants partake in observable frisks and gambols, which

|| 34 “Talmente per certa similitudine, se non per raggioni di medesimo geno, si può considerare come fia possibile che per il senso lubrico et oscuro de gli occhi possa esser scaldato et acceso di quella luce l’affetto, la quale secondo medesima raggione non può essere nel mezzo. Come la luce del sole secondo altra raggione è nell’aria tramezzante, altra nel senso vicino, et altra nel senso commune, et altra ne l’intelletto: quantumque da un modo proceda l’altro modo di essere.” Bruno, Des fureurs Héroїques, 407. For similar metaphors, see 417, 419, 421. Bruno tells us that the superior intellect is unique, whereas the inferior is multiform and cannot merge with the sun’s divine light, since the intellect sees thanks to the moon’s reflected light (221, 231). For the moon as symbol of human intelligence, see 241. 35 Bruno, Des fureurs Héroїques, 457–459.

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only deft craftsmen could accurately depict due to the subtleties and irregular oscillations within. Tristram might consider himself adequately equipped for the task but he knows that a different method of inquiry is needed. Such descriptions should be left to narrators from Mercury. The glass breast: is an advantage not to be had by the biographer in this planet;—in the planet Mercury (belike) it may be so, if not better still for him;——for there the intense heat of the country, which is proved by computators, from its vicinity to the sun, to be more than equal to that of red-hot iron,—must, I think, long ago have vitrified the bodies of the inhabitants, (as the efficient cause) to suit them for the climate (which is the final cause) (TS I, xxiii, 83)

In the hermeneuts’ planet, there seems to be no confusion about mental phenomena. One could even claim that words do not make the object opaquer. However, transparency is only available for interactions in the present. Time changes the mercurial dwellers and misshapes their bodies like the accidents that befell Tristram. Mercury denizens are immaculate: till the inhabitants grow old and tolerably wrinkled, whereby the rays of light, in passing through them, become so monstrously refracted,——or return reflected from their surfaces in such transverse lines to the eye, that a man cannot be seen through;—his soul might as well, unless for mere ceremony, or the trifling advantage which the umbilical point gave her,—might, upon all other accounts, I say, as well play the fool out o’doors as in her own house. (TS I, xxiii, 83)

While, for Mercury’s denizens, the newly acquired privacy represents an opportunity to let go and play the fool – a quote from Hamlet according to New’s notes – , for the biographers, it represents a nightmare. To recognize the ideas embedded in the monstrous refractions a biographer must posit series that correlate the transformations of the refracted ideas with those of the refracting body. In a similar vein to Bruno’s reflections, the light does not directly change them. Their vitrification is produced by their position in relation to the sun, by their gravitational center in a multipolar cosmos, but still they think with their bodies, with an embodied symbolic form through which the world becomes intelligible. Now the case of earthlings is quite different. The casing for their souls is opaque, “our minds shine not through the body, but are wrapt up here in a dark covering of uncrystalized flesh and blood; so that, if we would come to the specific characters of them, we must go some other way to work” (TS I, xxiii, 83). The method proposed by Tristram is explained ex negative, but only in appear-

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ance. He tells the reader that he will not do it “with wind instruments” nor “mathematical exactness” (I, xxiii, 84), so he might be renouncing the help of Fame, muses and classic rules of composition; nor will he construct a character “against the light”, or “in the Camera” where most “ridiculous attitudes” appear (I, xxiii, 85). But there is one stylistic device Tristram refuses to use that unmasks his pun: […] draw a man’s character from no other helps in the world, but merely from his evacuations;—but this often gives a very incorrect outline,—unless, indeed, you take a sketch of his repletions too; and by correcting one drawing from the other, compound one good figure out of them both. I should have no objection to this method, but that I think it must smell too strong of the lamp,—and be render’d still more operose, by forcing you to have an eye to the rest of his Non-naturals.——Why the most natural actions of a man’s life should be called his Nonnaturals,—is another question. (I, xxiii, 84)

If actions are evacuations and the history of accidents that maimed Tristram their corresponding repletions, this means that Tristram’s narrative agenda is a mixture of ingredients. He includes them, but does not advocate for their causal link. He uses traditional textual devices to stir in, contrasts his characters with one another and even shows them in their private chambers. Tristram as a narrator even takes the liberty to deviate from the “honourable devices which the Pentagraphic Brethren36 of the brush have shewn in taking copies.—These, you must know, are your great historians” (I, xxiii, 85). In other words, he will deviate from the facts in his search for truth. Ultimately, all the aforementioned elements are neatly threaded and subsumed under one word that refuses to bestow primacy on any method or concept: To avoid all and every one of these errors in giving you my uncle Toby’s character, I am determined to draw it by no mechanical help whatever;——nor shall my pencil be guided by any one wind-instrument which ever was blown upon, either on this, or on the other side of the Alps;—nor will I consider either his repletions or his discharges,—or touch upon his Non-naturals—but, in a word, I will draw my uncle Toby’s character from his Hobby-Horse. (I, xxiii, 85)

|| 36 This is Sterne’s own footnote: “Pentagraph, an instrument to copy Prints and Pictures mechanically, and in any proportion.” (I, xxiii, 85)

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The hobbyhorse is how Tristram has named his method of assessing the refracted light and the refracting body, a procedure that avoids postulating a direct relation between causes and effects and prefers to focus on the hobbyhorsical performance, thereby implementing all methods of outlining a character. This method focuses on the intrinsic modalities of being that arise in a world rife with similitudes and lacking an original.37 The hobbyhorse construed as a modal distinction is fundamental here. It reveals the difference within a framework that posits a univocal concept of Being throughout modal variations.38 It also draws attention to intensive variations, to the degrees that reveal a further modal difference.39 Each intensive variation affirms a proposition; each hobbyhorse advances its theory on necessity and feasibility. Intensions are the gateway to modal differences grounded in potentiality and with ethical implications. They show the way to the Kierkegaardian task of becoming the concrete Self or, in other worlds, they raise an “‘ obligation’ pour le mode, qui est de déployer toute sa puissance ou son être dans la limite elle-même.”40 To become oneself through contemplation it is nec-

|| 37 Deleuze, Différence et répétition, 56. 38 “En effet, l’essentiel de l’univocité n’est pas que l’Être se dise en un seul et même sens. C’est qu’il se dise, en un seul et même sens, de toutes ses différences individuantes ou modalités intrinsèques. L’être est le même pour toutes ces modalités, mais ces modalités ne sont pas les mêmes. Il est ‘égal’ pour toutes, mais elles-mêmes ne sont pas égales. Il se dit en un seul sens de toutes, mais elles-mêmes n’ont pas le même sens. II est de l’essence de l’être univoque de se rapporter à des différences individuantes, mais ces différences n’ont pas la même essence, et ne varient pas l’essence…” Deleuze, Différence et répétition, 53. 39 “La distinction formelle, en effet, est bien une distinction réelle, puisqu’elle est fondée dans l’être ou dans la chose, mais n’est pas nécessairement une distinction numérique, parce qu’elle s’établit entre des essences ou sens, entre des ‘raisons formelles’ qui peuvent laisser subsister l’unité du sujet auquel on les attribue. Ainsi, non seulement l’univocité de l’être (par rapport à Dieu et aux créatures) se prolonge dans l’univocité des ‘attributs’, mais, sous la condition de son infinité, Dieu peut posséder ces attributs univoques formellement distincts sans rien perdre de son unité. L’autre type de distinction, la distinction modale, s’établit entre l’être ou les attributs d’une part, et d’autre part les variations intensives dont ils sont capables. Ces variations, comme les degrés du blanc, sont des modalités individuantes dont l’infini et le fini constituent précisément les intensités singulières. Du point de vue de sa propre neutralité, l’être univoque n’implique donc pas seulement des formes qualitatives ou des attributs distincts eux-mêmes univoques, mais se rapporte et les rapporte à des facteurs intensifs ou des degrés individuants qui en varient le mode sans en modifier l’essence en tant qu’être.” Deleuze, Différence et répétition, 58. 40 This is grounded in Deleuze’s interpretation of the eternal return: “Revenir est l’être, mais seulement l’être du devenir. L’éternel retour ne fait pas revenir ‘le même’, mais le revenir constitue le seul Même de ce qui devient. Revenir, c’est le devenir-identique du devenir lui-même.

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essary to delve into the process of individuation and examine the mode arising from it. The method should be based on an embodied immanent principle or, in Shandean terms, on the hobbyhorse that constructs other hobbyhorses. This comprising method is of course influenced by the humoral theory that Sterne adopted from Burton. Regarding this subject, the discussion in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften does not tackle the issue directly, but it is implied in the Moosbrugger complex and hinted at throughout the novel. For instance, in a conversation between Bonadea and Ulrich, the “polyglanduläres Gleichgewicht” that affects character moves Bonadea to say: “Also irgendeine Drüsensache […]. Es ist schon eine gewisse Beruhigung, wenn man weiß, daß man nichts dafür kann!” (MoE 880) She resorts to modern temperament theory to justify her actions and rid herself of responsibility: “Und wenn man schnell aus dem Gleichgewicht kommt, entstehen eben leicht mißglückte Sexualerlebnisse!” (MoE 880) Bonadea simplifies the interrelationships between body and mind and reminds us of Moosbrugger. To play the fool in and out of house does not only mean that intentions have become inscrutable and all behavior seems comical, but also that a worldview is embodied and plots an inescapable course of action. Without the possibility to move between perspectives, one comes to the dreaded stagnation in which the body becomes a prison or, like in Moosbrugger’s case, a second prison consolidated during his wanderings: Und wer denkt daran, was es heißt, sich tage- und wochenlang nicht richtig waschen zu können. Die Haut wird so steif, daß sie nur grobe Bewegungen erlaubt, selbst wenn man zärtliche machen wollte, und unter einer solchen Kruste erstarrt die lebendige Seele. Der Verstand mag weniger davon berührt werden, das Notwendige wird man ganz vernünftig tun; er mag eben wie ein kleines Licht in einem riesigen wandelnden Leuchtturm brennen, der voll zerstampfter Regenwürmer oder Heuschrecken ist, aber alles Persönliches ist darin zerquetscht, und es wandelt nur die gärende organische Substanz. (MoE 70)

In his penurious pilgrimage to the east, Moosbrugger acquired an insulation that hinders his movements and deprives him of the capacity to engage in complex intentional actions. He can only fulfill his basic needs. What once was a swarming mental life with maggots’ gambols and bees’ frisks has lost its energy and turned into a pitiful picture of trampled insects, dead ideas impossible to || Revenir est donc la seule identité, mais l’identité comme puissance seconde, l’identité de la différence, l’identique qui se dit du différent, qui tourne autour du différent. Une telle identité, produite par la différence, est déterminée comme ‘répétition’.” Deleuze, Différence et répétition, 59.

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appropriate. In contrast to the glass-breasted people, the lighthouse gives a partial view of its contents, only through a reduced opening and with a light artificially directed in one direction. There is no refraction and the materials employed for its construction won’t succumb to the heat. Even on Mercury, it is very unlikely for the stone to yield and lose its shape like the malleable glass. For this reason, Moosbrugger resides in his one world, whereas Tristram moves through diverse discourses and modes of explanation. The difference resides in the combination between material and form: A man’s body and his mind, with the utmost reverence to both I speak it, are exactly like a jerkin, and a jerkin’s lining;—rumple the one,—you rumple the other. There is one certain exception however in this case, and that is, when you are so fortunate a fellow, as to have had your jerkin made of gum-taffeta, and the body-lining to it of a sarcenet, or thin persian. (III, iv, 189)

As we know, Ulrich is kin to Tristram and, though not so flexible, he still grapples with the possibilities of becoming a shapeshifter by merging architectonical styles from different epochs. Ulrich devotes himself to the grave task of working with stone – instead of linings – to manipulate the interrelationship between his house’s facade and its interiors. However, he does not seek to gain autonomy by controlling all the aspects and has left almost all decisions in the hands of chance. He prefers to rely on his orientation prowess and scavenges from his surroundings to construct his “I”: Man lernt das Wechselspiel zwischen Innen und Außen erkennen, und gerade durch das Verständnis für das Unpersönliche am Menschen ist man dem Persönlichen auf neue Spuren gekommen, auf gewisse einfache Grundverhaltensweisen, einen Ichbautrieb, der wie der Nestbautrieb der Vögel aus vieler Art Stoff nach ein paar Verfahren sein Ich aufrichtet. Man ist bereits so nahe daran, durch bestimmte Einflüsse allerhand entartete Zustände verbauen zu können wie einen Wildbach, daß es beinahe nur noch auf eine soziale Fahrlässigkeit hinausläuft oder auf einen Rest von Ungeschicklichkeit, wenn man aus Verbrechern nicht rechtzeitig Erzengel macht. Und so ließe sich sehr vieles anführen, Zerstreutes, einander noch nicht nahe Gekommenes, was zusammenwirkt, daß man der groben Annäherungen müde wird, die unter einfacheren Bedingungen für ihre Anwendung entstanden sind, und allmählich die Nötigung erlebt, eine Moral, die seit zweitausend Jahren immer nur im kleinen dem wechselnden Geschmack angepaßt worden ist, in den Grundlagen der Form zu verändern und gegen eine andere einzutauschen, die sich der Beweglichkeit der Tatsachen genauer anschmiegt. Nach Ulrichs Überzeugung fehlte dazu eigentlich nur noch die Formel; jener Ausdruck, den das Ziel einer Bewegung, noch ehe es erreicht ist, in irgendeinem glücklichen Augenblick finden muß, damit das letzte Stück des Wegs zurückgelegt werden kann […]. (MoE 252)

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The formula – hardened version of the form – is what gives cohesion to the ethos and projects a plot to follow, a riverbed to channel everything into. But beyond the formula there is a human colloidal essence that can assume any form. In Musil’s novel, character construction with all its components supersedes, at least in this context, the paradigm of an abstract absolute. Moral character is the result of the interplay between inner and outer determinations, which are articulated by triggering functions.41 Though charged with skepticism even towards the concrete, Ulrich’s quest seems to acquire a Kierkegaardian tone with, according to Roth, a colloidal attire: “Die Überzeugung des Denkers von der weitgehenden Bildsamkeit des seelischen menschlichen Gehalts – ‘daß der Mensch eine Ungestalt ist, eine kolloidale Substanz, die sich Formen anschmiegt, nicht sich bildet’, – führt zu der unabweisbaren Verpflichtung, auf diese ‘liquide Masse’ zu wirken, sie zu formen.”42 In both novels, there are conduits through which energy is transferred from one system to another. However, there is always a trace of skepticism that invites us to filter all interrelationships through fictional narratives. Ulrich’s world becomes visible and manageable only through functions that eschew any deterministic claim bounded to an individual. For Tristram, instead, a hobbyhorse emerges with the rumpling of a jerkin and its lining. But there is never direct exchange between the ideal and corporeal realms, only friction that ensues from their direct, albeit inscrutable, contact: A man and his Hobby-Horse, tho’ I cannot say that they act and re-act exactly after the same manner in which the soul and body do upon each other: Yet doubtless there is a communication between them of some kind; and my opinion rather is, that there is something in it more of the manner of electrified bodies,—and that, by means of the heated parts of the rider, which come immediately into contact with the back of the HobbyHorse,—by long journeys and much friction, it so happens, that the body of the rider is at length fill’d as full of Hobby-Horsical matter as it can hold;——so that if you are able to give but a clear description of the nature of the one, you may form a pretty exact notion of the genius and character of the other. (I, xxiv, 86)

Where exactly the transactions between the physical and symbolic realms take place is impossible to assess. Indeterminateness is the only trait that characterizes the transformation of repletions into evacuations in the secularized and skeptical framework represented by the hobbyhorse. Repletions are not ingested and internalized in an organic process, but rather slowly charge the body || 41 Roth, Ethik und Ästhetik, 88. 42 Roth, Ethik und Ästhetik, 112.

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with constant friction, with a symbolic force that is accumulated through habits and establishes needs, moves to act, and perhaps suspends the question of incontinence because the rider will discharge its energy somehow. And still, there is no essential core, but an endless method that reveals a form with its movement. This wandering is the fundamental stylistic device of both the digressive/conversationalist and the essayistic novel, and it leads to a dismemberment that eschews any principle and prefers to stress differences.43 Particularly in Tristram Shandy, movement grounds a fundamental skepticism that does not entail a “suspension between equally interesting alternatives, [which] is unsustainable because “interest,” a word weighted with theological as well as moral meaning in the eighteenth century, denies us the pleasure and satisfaction we might otherwise take in stasis.”44 There is no stable point on which to anchor our approach towards an individual, but this lack of foundation does not mean that events cannot leave traces on the mind. Although the point where repletions and evacuations meet will remain indeterminate, there is a logic that correlates them, and the possibility of an energy exchange – whose frictional transfer implies that no boundaries are breached – indicates that rider and hobbyhorse can receive impressions. They are indirectly linked by a frictional principle. If Tristram’s digressive grappling with tradition, on the one hand, demonstrates that there are neither originals nor copies in the world, but an appropriation of fragments and relics of learning; his account of maiming accidents, on the other, gives voice to the conviction that a human or even the unformed “homunculus cannot be a tabula rasa; he must already possess a brain marked

|| 43 Nübel, Robert Musil. Essayismus, 495. “Das essayistische Schreiben, das von Blanchot als fragmentarisches bestimmt wird, ist ein kreisförmiges Schreiben ohne Zentrum. Es sucht weder nach einer Mitte noch nach der Einheit, stattdessen folgt es dem Prinzip der ‘Zerstückelung’ wie der Verknüpfung gleichermaßen. Essayismus ist ein Vertextungsverfahren, das ein durchgestrichenes Zentrum von den Rändern bzw. von der Peripherie her umschreibt. Das essayistische Umkreisen, der Umweg, das ‘konstruktive’ Irren folgt nicht einer geraden Linie oder einer klaren Zielvorgabe, sondern der ‘Wendung’, die sich dem zuwendet, wovon sie sich abwendet und die sich vom dem abwendet, dem sie sich im selben Augenblick zuwendet. Es gehorcht nicht dem ‘princ.[ipium] ident.[atis]’, sondern der Differenz, nicht dem Text-Sinn, sondern der Textverknüpfung. Es steht nicht unmittelbar vor, noch über oder unter den Texten, es steht zwischen ihnen. Es spricht nicht von ihnen oder über sie, es spricht mit ihnen. Es blickt sie an, aber nicht von einem quasi-archimedischen Punkt, sondern ‘aus dem Augenwinkel heraus, mit halbabgewandten Kopfe’. Es sieht selbst beim Schreiben zu und kommentiert sich, die anderen Texte fortschreibend, fortlaufend selbst.” 44 New, “Sterne and the narrative of Determinateness”, 325.

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by the traces of association.”45 Hence, Tristram Shandy depicts a process that goes from the singularity grounded in accidental origins towards recognizability, “a specific conversion of accident into limited design.”46 A design, however, based on a malleable essence: “Now if you will venture to go along with me, and look down into the bottom of this matter, it will be found that the cause of obscurity and confusion, in the mind of a man, is threefold. Dull organs, dear Sir, in the first place. Secondly, slight and transient impressions made by the objects, when the said organs are not dull. And thirdly, a memory like unto a sieve, not able to retain what it has received” (II, ii, 99). This example argues that body and mind can be conjointly coined due to their potential to retain or lose their form by interacting with their environment.47 For Tristram, this double reaction can be more accurately described by a plastic example, in which the organs are not dull and solidified, but flexible enough to be imaginative and allow somebody to receive light and temporarily adopt an idea: “take that opportunity to recollect that the organs and faculties of perception can, by nothing in this world, be so aptly typified and explained as by that one thing which Dolly’s hand is in search of.—Your organs are not so dull that I should inform you—’tis an inch, Sir, of red seal-wax” (II, ii, 99). By addressing the reader, the narrator is contending with Descartes’s Wax argument and reveals imagination—even Descartes’s imagination—as the fundament or conduit for embodied knowledge.48 || 45 Jonathan Lamb, Sterne’s Fiction and the Double Principle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 78. 46 Lamb, Sterne’s Fiction, 22. For recognizability, see 41. 47 Such is Lamb’s double principle: “When mutual ambidexterity is exercised on a narrative where the characters themselves are happily seizing handles, Shandean skepticism is limitless, unbounded by beginnings, ends, plots or reasons. Instead of a pseudo-providence of achieved purposes, what is represented, recommended and practiced on both sides of the text is a series of happy accidents affording every character, object and word a double appearance and a double function. As all things act and react with their circumstances, their opposites or their perceivers, there is no part of the narrative, whether scene, commentary or reading, not constitutive of the factors constituting it.” 11. 48 According to New’s notes, this chapter also alludes to Locke’s Philosophy. New and New, “The Notes”, 131. But perhaps Descartes’s wax argument is a further intertext which leads to a conclusion that Tristram would never support: “Let us take, for example, this piece of wax: it has been taken quite freshly from the hive, and it has not yet lost the sweetness of the honey which it contains; […]. Finally all the things which are requisite to cause us distinctly to recognise a body, are met with in it. But notice that while I speak and approach the fire what remained of the taste is exhaled, the smell evaporates, the colour alters, the figure is destroyed, the size increases, it becomes liquid, it heats, scarcely can one handle it, and when one strikes it, now sound is emitted. Does the same wax remain after this change? We must confess that it

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The scene draws attention to the exact moment in which a form is impressed in the wax: “When this is melted, and dropped upon the letter, if Dolly fumbles too long for her thimble, till the wax is over hardened, it will not receive the mark of her thimble from the usual impulse which was wont to imprint it” (II, ii, 99). Here, one could fairly assume that the wax has been melted either by the sun light, a direct exposition to flame, or the friction created by the habitual riding of a hobbyhorse. Now passion enlivens the dull organs, but to make an impression, one needs, though not to tax the fine-motor skills, still a deft and pragmatic hand that can drop wax on the letter and press the thimble against it to leave an impression. The exact moment in which diverse elements interact is thus crucial for the process, as is the type of wax: If Dolly’s wax, for want of better, is bees-wax, or of a temper too soft,—tho’ it may receive,—it will not hold the impression, how hard soever Dolly thrusts against it; and last of all, supposing the wax good, and eke the thimble, but applied thereto in careless haste, as her Mistress rings the bell;——in any one of these three cases the print left by the thimble will be as unlike the prototype as a brass-jack. (II, ii, 99)

The experience on which all further experiences are based can be traced back to the impression left by an event. It provides a mold to encase ideas in. But this is just a form that will likely adopt all kinds of singular topographies, until the wax becomes dull and immune, or better said, resistant to all heat sources. The waxy essence is the metaphor that highlights the corporeal part of knowledge in Tristram Shandy and reminds us of Aristotle’s De Anima 2.1, in which the “organic natural body” is in a certain sense dull. “For this reason, it is also unnecessary to inquire whether the soul and body are one, just as it is unnecessary to ask this concerning the wax and the shape, nor generally concerning the matter of each thing and that of which it is the matter. For while one and being are spoken of in several ways, what is properly so spoken of is the actuality.”49 Talking about impression might seem to betray the skeptical notions regarding body and mind relations and to feed a misconception based on the para-mechanical theory that seeks to trace mental causes to a specific event.50 || remains; none would judge otherwise.” René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, edited by S. Tweyman (London/New York: Routledge, 1993) 55. 49 Aristotle, De Anima, 2.1, 412b4–412b9, trans. Christopher Shields (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 23. 50 Ryle, The Concept of Mind, 220. “Impressions are ghostly impulses, postulated for the ends of a para-mechanical theory. The very word ‘impression’, borrowed as it was from the description of dents made in wax, betrays the motives of the theory. It is a philosophical misfortune

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However, impressions are construed quite differently here, since the waxy essence underscores the fact that something left a trace and might pave the way towards a disposition. The matter can be glass or wax, but their deformations can only be perceived through actualizations, through refracted light or the actual prominence of the wax, that is, through the matter described through predictions: When we describe glass as brittle, or sugar as soluble, we are using dispositional concepts, the logical force of which is this. The brittleness of glass does not consist in the fact that it is at a given moment actually being shivered. It may be brittle without ever being shivered. To say that it is brittle is to say that if it ever is, or ever had been, struck or strained, it would fly, or have flown, into fragments. To say that sugar is soluble is to say that it would dissolve, or would have dissolved, if immersed in water. A statement ascribing a dispositional property to a thing has much, though not everything, in common with a statement subsuming the thing under a law. To possess a dispositional property is not to be in a particular state, or to undergo a particular change; it is to be bound or liable to be in a particular state, or to undergo a particular change, when a particular condition is realised. The same is true about specifically human dispositions such as qualities of character.51

Character as a figure of thought attempts to refer to a bundle of dispositions, but to completely assess their scope is impossible. There is no vantage point from which to establish a stable definition of “brittleness.” In Shandean terms, the incessant exchange between mind and body perform a gradual transformation of this “brittleness,” since the matter changes along with the concept. Change undermines the search for causes, since they depend on an actual definition of “brittle” as an attribute bound to matter and “brittle” as a set of plausible realizations. Hence, movement is what safeguards the skeptical requirements of a secularized rationale. In this shifting landscape, we find consolation, argues Lamb,52 in the only promise that Sterne kept throughout the novel, expounded in the Epigraph: “It is not things, but opinions concerning them, that disturb us.”53 In Tristram Shandy, consolation is the “translation of real imperfections and loss into repre|| that the theory was able to trade on, and pervert, the vocabulary in which we tell the things that we find out by feeling.” 51 Ryle, The Concept of Mind, 31. 52 Here I draw many ideas, for instance, iterations as failure of consolation and aposiopesis as interruption, from Lamb, Sterne’s Fiction, 6–29. 53 Another translation of the fragment of the aphorism by Epictetus is “Men are disturbed, not by Things, but by the Principles and Notions, which they form concerning Things.” New, Davies and Day, “The Notes”, vol. 3 from Tristram Shandy, ed. New, 37.

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sentations which complicate feelings and associate ideas.”54 Consolation can be attained through the understanding grounded in the reconstruction of an ethos. However, consolation leads straight against the unsurmountable barrier of indeterminateness, since it is thrusted at by polysemy, imagination, aposiopesis and iterations. The richness of perspectives, names, and discourses that help describe a phenomenon make it impossible to define it. We might attempt to make use of our imagination and posit the line of beauty, a character, or brittleness as complete, but, for Tristram, all attempts end in disruption and collide against aposiopesis, against that meaningful remnant that cannot be encased and escapes with every iteration, like the intensive difference evinced by the mourning for: Alas, poor Y O R I C K ! Ten times in a day has Yorick’s ghost the consolation to hear his monumental inscription read over with such a variety of plaintive tones, as denote a general pity and esteem for him; (TS I, xii, 35)

3.3 Brittleness: between determinism and predictions Dismemberment, skepticism, and consolation not only help define a method of inquiry based on the constraints that ensue when body and mind affect each other through physic and symbolic vicissitudes. These motifs also appear in a discussion of the observer’s role and the scope of this inquiry, which deals with the inclinations that constitute a character. These inclinations do not refer to attributes that cause something but cast the shadow of dispositional properties. Dispositions can be explained with “elliptical expressions of general hypothetical propositions [such as] ‘Whenever situations of certain sorts have arisen, he has always or usually tried to make himself prominent’ […]. Sentences beginning with ‘Whenever’ are not singular occurrence reports. Motive words used in this way signify tendencies or propensities and therefore cannot signify the occurrence of feelings.”55 Following this reasoning, moral character subsumes all possible dispositional traits, and its primacy in the narrative construction implies a paradigm shift from causal explanations towards motives, in the sense of sedimentation of tradition and the developmental history of embodied cogni-

|| 54 Lamb, Sterne’s Fiction, 29. 55 Ryle, The Concept of Mind, 71.

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tion. This shift was tackled in this investigation’s first part and the main argument was “that to explain an act as done from a certain motive is not analogous to saying that the glass broke, because a stone hit it, but to the quite different type of statement that the glass broke, when the stone hit it, because the glass was brittle.”56 Though not exactly brittleness, this subchapter’s subject is the question of how an ethos can be used to navigate between determinism and divination without abandoning a skeptical stance rooted in stoicism. In this respect, the preliminary question is related to its application: When does a case fall within the scope of a rule? When does the rule stop applying because the case has undermined it? Such is the baffling experience that Tristram undergoes when he discoveres his parents’ marriage settlement: “This, by the way, was no more than what was reasonable;—and yet, as reasonable as it was, I have ever thought it hard that the whole weight of the article should have fallen entirely, as it did, upon myself” (I, xv, 46). In other words, a reason’s weight would mean nothing without the law of gravitation that makes an article fall upon Tristram’s nose. This playful formulation, in which reasons, mechanics, and laws are disarticulated to reveal contingency, presents “weight” as a motif used to discuss the relationship between physical deterministic systems and the predictions made based on the knowledge of an ethos. The laws of men and nature still apply to Tristram’s case, but their consequences are not intended or foreseen in any law. Instead, the case helps to undermine the rule and the logic that binds it to the case. Tristram’s perspective transforms the way in which the world’s rules apply. He reads the settlement to find out why he was born in Shandy Hall and not in a hospital. According to the article, if the Shandy family made a trip to London without his mother being pregnant, she would have to “lye-in” in the country during her next pregnancy – once again gravity presses the matters with a verb directed downwards. But the point is that this rule, while having no direct bearing on Tristram’s nose, it still affected it. The relation between a rule and its application to a case fails due to the singular perspective that departs from a unique case and undermines any lawlike proposition. This kind of skeptical leeway paves the way for a more interesting, puzzling case: […] nor do I think anything else in Nature would have given such immediate ease: She, dear Goddess, by an instantaneous impulse, in all provoking cases, determines us to a sally of this or that member—or else she thrusts us into this or that place or posture of body, we know not why——But mark, madam, we live amongst riddles and mysteries——the most obvious things, which come in our way, have dark sides, which the quickest sight || 56 Ryle, The Concept of Mind, 72.

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cannot penetrate into; and even the clearest and most exalted understandings amongst us find ourselves puzzled and at a loss in almost every cranny of nature’s works: so that this, like a thousand other things, falls out for us in a way, which tho’ we cannot reason upon it—yet we find the good of it, may it please your reverences and your worships——and that’s enough for us. (IV, xvii, 350)

An energy transfer from nature to body, which will initiate a movement, can be expected to “thrust us” in a direction. Perhaps one can foresee a movement, but the exact mechanisms governing the transaction remain a mystery. Why is there a reaction? Tristram claims that this surpasses what we can reason upon. The riddle resides in the impossibility to attempt “an analysis (or translation) of mental statements into a series of dispositional statements which are themselves construed as subjunctive conditionals describing what the agent will do (albeit under the relevant action description) under various circumstances.”57 However, one can still speculate around these dark sides and approach them through hypothetical propositions to produce lawlike statements bounded to a disposition. But the problem when dealing with behaviour is that, for instance, “if we wished to unpack all that is conveyed in describing an animal as gregarious, we should similarly have to produce an infinite series of different hypothetical propositions.”58 Baffled by a similar problem, Tristram advances the following behavioural conundrum: When the misfortune of my Nose fell so heavily upon my father’s head;—the reader remembers that he walked instantly up stairs, and cast himself down upon his bed; and from hence, unless he has a great insight into human nature, he will be apt to expect a rotation of the same ascending and descending movements from him, upon his misfortune of my Name;——no. (IV, XVII, 349)

Walter defies or perhaps copes with the laws of gravity by means of a vertical motion that carries upstairs what previously figuratively fell on his head. If that movement helped him to come to terms with the nose accident, maybe a similar motion will help with future accidents. But this was not the case: “Now, my father could not lie down with this affliction for his life——nor could he carry it up stairs like the other—he walked composedly out with it to the fish-pond” (IV,

|| 57 Julia Tanney, “Rethinking Ryle. A Critical Discussion of The Concept of Mind”, in Ryle, The Concept of Mind, xxvi. 58 This is also the quote that Tanney uses to support her argument. Ryle, The Concept of Mind, 32.

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xvii, 350). Although consolation can be easily labelled an inner process, the narrator avoids any claim on Walter’s inner life and focuses on the observable. By doing so, he is perhaps undermining the limits of those elliptical propositions with which one attempts to predict reactions and understand a character. Whenever an accident befalls his son, Walter seeks consolation, but since one cannot know the nature of his inner debate nor the inner items correlated to the accident’s “weight”, Tristram can only claim that Walter’s reaction to every misfortune will be to move. However, consolation is not related to a specific kind of motion. Therein resides the riddle. What one might expect to be a vertical motion that symbolically processes the weight that falls upon one’s shoulders, turns out to be a circular stroll. Consolation will inevitably ensue after some time, but the only observable features in this process are movements unrelated to an inner debate. Physical causes are unrelated to affective effects. Paradoxically, the only constant is consolation, and, in a stoic vein, it is felt after assessing if the things or opinions that are disturbing for us are in our hands. Stoic determinism stipulates that everything in this world has a cause or concomitant causes that produce a deterministic mechanical system, in which disaster irrupts when ignorance makes us overlook life’s circumstances.59 Tristram Shandy puts these premises to the test, but not by projecting a fictional world abiding by these rules. Rather, Tristram focuses on the act of narration and the stoic tenets represent the cornerstone of a retrospective method of narrative inquiry. A complex causal net defines Tristram’s world, hinting at an unmanageable quantity of factors and at the biased view with which one defines and tackles circumstances. Despite our inescapable intellectual shortsightedness, the stoic causal determinism makes room for predictions, which are product of a techne.60 Only someone like Tristram could be considered by the stoics as a seer, since he has

|| 59 Dorothea Frede, “Determinismus in der Stoa”, in Stoizismus in der europäischen Philosophie, Literatur, Kunst und Politik: eine Kulturgeschichte von der Antike bis zur Moderne, vol. 1, ed. Barbara Neymeyr (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008), 138–139, 148, 158. See also Armand Jagu, “La Morale d’Epictete et le christianisme”, in Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt, vol. 36.3, ed. Wolfgang Haase and Hildegard Temporini (Berlin/New York: De Gruyter, 1989), 2184. For the focus on circumstances see J. P. Hershbell, “The Stoicism of Epictetus: Twentieth Century Perspectives”, in Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt, vol. 36.3, ed. Wolfgang Haase and Hildegard Temporini (Berlin/New York: De Gruyter, 1989), 2155. 60 Susanne Bobzien, Determinism and Freedom in Stoic Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), 87–93. “It is noteworthy that divination, as viewed by the Stoics, thus had all the elements of an empirical science: data, induction, propositions of a type similar to ‘laws of nature’, explanation, and prediction.” (88)

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learned to identify the signs – in a countenance – and correlate them to a specific behavior, like Walter’s grieving for Tristram’s losses. He scrutinizes the causal intertwinement and knows that: “The different weight, dear Sir——nay even the different package of two vexations of the same weight——makes a very wide difference in our manner of bearing and getting through with them” (IV, XVII, 349). The type of motion is partly determined by an object’s form. For instance, a cylinder and a cone can receive the same thrust and their motion would be different, not to mention the possible dents that might change these figures’ regular pace.61 The ethical consequences here are crucial, since accountability resides in distinguishing if our inner disposition would have prevented from or thrusted us into motion or a course of action.62 Although his statements about the future are vague and, due to the novel’s pervasive skepticism, never correlate specific attributes or actions to specific reactions, the construction of a moral character implies a glimpse into the future. Mourning, an activity in which body and mind might work together and grant rationality, is part of Walter’s fate. Tristram might not be able to predict that Walter will walk, but he can be certain that any further material-moral morcellation, any further sign in the causal chain of events, will be accompanied by a mourning motion. This scene translates into narrative terms two main considerations from stoic philosophy, namely, there is no motion without a cause, and the statements are either true or false. Both propositions lead to the idea that predictions are true now, but the motion is in the future.63

|| 61 Bobzien, Determinism and Freedom, 258–268. 62 Dorothea Frede, “Determinismus in der Stoa”, 156. “Wenn jemand beispielsweise dem Zylinder nicht nur einen Stoß gibt, sondern ihn damit zugleich verformt, so ist er nicht mehr fähig zu rollen. Damit hätten sich vielmehr zugleich seine Natur und Gestalt verändert. Eine entsprechende Wirkung kann die causa antecedens auch auf den Menschen ausüben: Ein äußerer Eindruck kann so stark sein, dass er die innere Verfassung verändert.” 63 Bobzien, Determinism and Freedom, 66–67. “For instance ‘Aspasia will walk tomorrow’ is true now precisely if Aspasia will walk tomorrow; in other words, if there is a time tomorrow at which Aspasia is walking. But unlike in the case of present motions there is no direct link between future motions and propositions correlated to them. The proposition is true now. The motion is in the future. I suggest that Chrysippus thought that nevertheless the present truth of the propositions about the future is contingent upon the future motion. But in Stoic philosophy there would be only one way for a connection between logic and physics (comparable to that between present motions and propositions correlated to them), by which it is possible that present truth is established by future motion, and this is by way of causation. Causes would be the only things that can bring about motions. So only if there is some causal connection between the present and the future time at which the motion obtains, can we have a connection

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With his digressions, Tristram simultaneously depicts the causal chain and the developmental history of the diverse characters that touched his life’s circumstances. These individuals are not cogwheels embedded in a purely mechanical system, but rather kernels in a constellation seeking balance. Each character is endowed with an idiosyncratic gravitational pull and, as a whole, the set of forces is in constant interaction. Their changes through time bring about accidents that inaugurate modal constraints from which to think the world again. World and characters are never fixed and the minimal differences in circumstance allow only to advance obscure predictions that, as in stoic philosophy, can be actualized many times.64 Walter will mourn his son’s lot for many reasons, causes, events, and in different ways, but he will mourn with a motion. And still, there is a mystery in this correlation: Had my father leaned his head upon his hand, and reasoned an hour which way to have gone———reason, with all her force, could not have directed him to anything like it: there is something, Sir, in fish-ponds——but what it is, I leave to system-builders and fish-ponddiggers betwixt ’em to find out—but there is something, under the first disorderly transport of the humours, so unaccountably becalming in an orderly and a sober walk towards one of them, that I have often wondered that neither Pythagoras, nor Plato, nor Solon, nor Lycurgus, nor Mahomet, nor any one of your noted lawgivers, ever gave order about them. (IV, xvii, 350–351)

The only certainty is that there will be a motion obliquely correlated to a mourning process. The semi-hypothetical propositions serve as formulas or husks without content that are always truth, although the motion is in the future. Predicates, as in Walter’s case, can be actualized many times and either have substance or are false.65 In more contemporary philosophical terms, the incessant systematization of predictions that aims at understanding and constructing an ethos resorts to projectible statements, for which “there is no particular instance on the determination of which acceptance depends.”66 The ethos, as a compound of lawlike statements, has no limits and “the idea behind it is just that the principle we use to decide counterfactual cases is a principle we are willing to commit ourselves to in deciding unrealized cases that are still subject

|| between physics and logic that can guarantee the truth of propositions correlated to future motions in a way comparable to that in the case of propositions correlated to present motions.” 64 Bobzien, Determinism and Freedom, 24. 65 Bobzien, Determinism and Freedom, 64. 66 Nelson Goodman, Fact, Fiction and Forecast (Indianapolis/New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1973), 24.

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to direct observation.”67 This commitment is translated in the manner in which one uses statements. When statements are used predictively – in this case narratively – they cast a shadow of causal connection over their elements instead of postulating such a connection.68 The focus on ethos is what separates Tristram Shandy from its stoic influence and marks the novel as a secularized approach because the commitment to a lawlike principle is bound to the particular worldview of the characters. Their perspectives work as a modal system that defines the possible and nonnecessary. In other words, if, for the stoics, “a prerequisite for something’s depending on us is that is both possible and non-necessary,”69 a prerequisite specified by “a ‘right’ modal system which ‘fits the world,”70 Tristram’s narrative endeavour steers away from the right and focuses on what is implied by stoic philosophy, namely, “that different modal systems can have different degrees of adequacy in describing the world.”71 Tristram’s description disassociates the moral right from the straight line and, by relying on the serpentine line of beauty, he reveals the “right’ modal theory [which] will specify what is necessary and what is possible in [his] world and thereby to what extent individual events in the world are necessitated,”72 as well as to what extent his foibles and whimsical behaviour is justified. He learns to love his fate with and in his narration.73

|| 67 Goodman, Fact, Fiction and Forecast, 20. 68 “I want only to emphasize the Humean idea that rather than a sentence being use for prediction because it is a law, it is called a law because it is used for prediction; and that rather than the law being used for prediction because it describes a causal connection, the meaning of the causal connection is to be interpreted in terms of predictively used laws.” Goodman, Fact, Fiction and Forecast, 21. 69 Bobzien, Determinism and Freedom, 97. 70 Bobzien, Determinism and Freedom, 98. 71 Bobzien, Determinism and Freedom, 98. 72 Bobzien, Determinism and Freedom, 98. 73 Žižek relates this narrative endeavor to Spinoza and Nietzsche: “Since, in this unique life of mine, I am constrained by the burden of the past weighing on me, the assertion of my unconditional will to power is always thwarted by that which, in the finitude of being thrown into a particular situation, I was forced to assume as given. Consequently, the only way to assert effectively my will to power is to transpose myself into a state in which I am able to will freely, assert as the outcome of my will, what I otherwise experience as imposed on me by external fate; and, the only way to accomplish this is to imagine that, in the future “returns of the same,” repetitions of my present predicament, I am fully ready to assume it freely. However, does this reasoning not also conceal the same formalism as that of Pascal? Is its hidden premise not “if I cannot freely choose my reality and thus overcome the necessity which determines me, I should formally elevate this necessity itself into something freely assumed by me?” Slavoj

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In other words, Sterne “does not conceptualize that subjectivity as coherent in the mode of realism, fully embodied and transparently available as character, if ultimately conflicted, still capable of integration. He conceptualizes it rather in fantastic terms as multiple and even pathologically divided, as mysterious to others and unknown even to itself.”74 For Tristram, a behavioural trend75 can only be distilled from a protracted narrative that includes copious cases to systematize, diverse exemplifications to advance, counterexamples to consider, annotations to weigh, etc. All indicating that the endeavour itself, not the product, is what might be deemed ethical. The shift of focus from cause to dispositions represents thus a shift from accountability to relational ethics through justification. Here, the main ethical concern is how one constructs a character. This kind of story leaves aside the actual actions and highlights the poetics of the feasible and unfeasible. Here there is always room for the question regarding what was in our hands, because “the general fact that a person is disposed to act in such and such ways in such and such circumstances does not by itself account for his doing a particular thing at a particular moment; any more than the fact that the glass was brittle accounts for its fracture at 10 p.m.”76 While Tristram is a fatalist who will mourn, Ulrich sceptically struggles to keep a firm hold of his mount’s reins by directing his efforts toward a critical assessment of personality. Ulrich must navigate a world rife with attributes that work as functions and are independent of an origin and entity to which they would be essentially bound: Wir sagen heute noch: ich liebe diese Frau, und ich hasse jenen Menschen, statt zu sagen, sie ziehen mich an oder stoßen mich ab. Und um einen Schritt genauer müßte man hinzufügen, daß ich es bin, der in ihnen die Fähigkeit erweckt, mich anzuziehen oder abzustoßen. Und noch um einen Schritt genauer müßte man dem hinzufügen, daß sie in mir die Eigenschaften hervorkehren, die dazu gehören. Und so weiter; man kann nicht sagen, wo da der erste Schritt geschieht, denn das ist eine gegenseitige, eine funktionale Abhängigkeit so wie zwischen zwei elastischen Bällen oder zwei geladenen Stromkreisen. Und wir

|| Žižek, Organs without Bodies: Deleuze and consequences (London/New York: Routledge, 2004), 39. 74 Moglen, “(W)holes and Noses: The Indeterminacies”, 89. For Moglen, subjectivity is in Sterne’s novel “a desiring subjectivity that seeks to articulate the absence and loss by which it has been shaped” (88). 75 Ryle, The Concept of Mind, 94. “[So] far it has been argued that to explain an action as done from a certain motive is not to correlate it with an occult cause, but to subsume it under a propensity or behaviour-trend.” 76 Ryle, The Concept of Mind, 98–99.

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wissen natürlich längst, daß wir auch so fühlen müßten, aber wir ziehen es noch immer beiweitem vor, die Ursache und Ur-Sache in den Kraftfeldern des Gefühls zu sein, die uns umgeben; wenn unsereiner zugibt, er mache einen anderen nach, drückt er es so aus, als ob das eine aktive Leistung wäre! (MoE 473)

Behind this impersonal world lurks the idea of attributes referring to disposition defined by semi-hypothesis, that is, lawlike statements regarding one’s own elasticity. Now, the picture becomes far more contrived if we include, in these calculations, the transformations that two electric circuits undergo, affecting each other’s dispositions. Causes are merely chimeras and to interpret something as a “planvolle Handlung” is wishful thinking, product of a “erstarrtem Bewußtseinszustand” overlooking the fact that when somebody falls madly in love, such a person behaves like a “Infusorium in vergiftetem Wasser” (MoE 473). Circumstances, like a toxic liquid culture, are more important to this single-celled organism than the causes that brought it to life or the causes behind its movements and expressions, which this rigid-minded protozoon claims to own. For this reason, the objection raised by Diotima about will and the control over decisions represents an outdated problem for Ulrich: “Es schwebt Ihnen vielleicht die alte, langweilig gewordene Streitfrage vor, ob der Mensch Herr seiner selbst sei oder nicht” entgegnete Ulrich, rasch aufblickend. “Wenn alles eine Ursache hat, dann kann man für nichts, und dergleichen? Ich muß Ihnen gestehn, daß mich das in meinem ganzen Leben nicht eine Viertelstunde lang interessiert hat. Es ist die Fragestellung einer Zeit, die unmerklich überholt worden ist; sie kommt von der Theologie, und außer Juristen, die noch sehr viel Theologie und Ketzerverbrennung in der Nase haben, fragen nach Ursachen heute nur noch Familienmitglieder, die sagen: Du bist die Ursache meiner schlaflosen Nächte, oder: der Kurssturz in Getreide war die Ursache seines Unglücks. Aber fragen Sie einen Verbrecher, nachdem Sie sein Gewissen aufgerüttelt haben, wie er dazu gekommen ist! Er weiß es nicht; auch dann nicht, wenn sein Bewußtsein nicht während eines einzigen Augenblicks der Tat abwesend war!” (MoE 473–474)

With an allusion to Moosbrugger, the paradigmatic criminal whose account invalidates the framework based on causes, actions, and decisions, Ulrich disposes of the judicial fondness for burning heretics. Common sense is suspended and superseded by an approach to the other through motives. However, it is not the question that Ulrich seems to refute, but the presuppositions from which it is answered. For him, a mechanical causal system can be posited as the background for any speculation, but causes are not the sole explanation for behaviour: “Nein. Überlegen Sie einmal: Wenn Gott alles vorher bestimmt und weiß, wie kann der Mensch sündigen? So wurde ja früher gefragt,

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und sehen Sie, es ist noch immer eine ganz moderne Fragestellung. Eine ungemein intrigante Vorstellung von Gott hatte man sich da gemacht.” (MoE 474) Quite contrary to the old worldview, in which God predetermined the laws governing all interactions and endowed its creatures with attributes that allowed them to act in specific ways but freely, the new secularized view advocates for a continuous understanding of the interrelated dynamics within a constellation. Since there is no fixed point from which to gain a panoramic view and single out an item from the scenery, Das Ich verliert die Bedeutung, die es bisher gehabt hat, als ein Souverän, der Regierungsakte erläßt; wir lernen sein gesetzmäßiges Werden verstehn, den Einfluß seiner Umgebung, die Typen seines Aufbaus, sein Verschwinden in den Augenblicken der höchsten Tätigkeit, mit einem Wort, die Gesetze, die seine Bildung und sein Verhalten regeln. Bedenken Sie: die Gesetze der Persönlichkeit, Kusine! Es ist das wie ein gewerkschaftlicher Zusammenschluß der einsamen Giftschlangen oder eine Handelskammer für Räuber!” (MoE 474)

For Ulrich, an individual no longer represents someone who has the reins in his hand and must decide which path to take at a crossroads. A rational individual should rather grapple with the abstract notion of personality and its lawlike propositions to regain rationality in modern terms. For this purpose, this individual should rely on vitriolic observations that undermine the norms. So one should leave the cavalry to become a highwayman, an outlaw who, like a poet, knows the laws he or she is breaking and that the violent methods might be commendable for an officer in war, but in the present situation will condemn anybody to the gallows. Personality, Ulrich tells us, should be tackled with the impetus of an outlaw and a poet’s talent to rekindle tradition. For Ulrich, prediction beyond the scope of inductive thinking is still an interesting question that steers away from providence. It was even addressed in the novel’s first chapter, in which the weather forecast establishes the world’s calm disposition, which is actually a nice summer day in August in which the Great War was quietly brewing.77

|| 77 The notion of training tackles predictions because one trains for the future. Fleig, Körperkultur und Moderne, 313. Training can provide a modal, albeit unconscious, layer to experience (205, 207). This layer springs from intuition (215) and offers ecstatic rationality: “Das Erlebnis der Entrückung beruht auf einer sich unbewusst einstellenden Verbindung von Innen- und Außenwelt, von Handeln und Erleben, die der Sport dem Einzelnen durch systematische Anleitung und gezieltes Training ermöglicht.” (212)

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Ulrich’s world was also concocted in a deterministic cauldron, whose programmatic features are introduced in the first lines.78 The novel’s first paragraph establishes a positivistic framework only to sneer at its predictions, lack of foresight, and, ultimately, at its inability to convey what a nice August day is: Ober dem Atlantik befand sich ein barometrisches Minimum; es wanderte ostwärts, einem über Rußland lagernden Maximum zu, und verriet noch nicht die Neigung, diesem nördlich auszuweichen. Die Isothermen und Isotheren taten ihre Schuldigkeit. Die Lufttemperatur stand in einem ordnungsgemäßen Verhältnis zur mittleren Jahrestemperatur, zur Temperatur des kältesten wie des wärmsten Monats und zur aperiodischen monatlichen Temperaturschwankung. Der Auf- und Untergang der Sonne, des Mondes, der Lichtwechsel des Mondes, der Venus, des Saturnringes und viele andere bedeutsame Erscheinungen entsprachen ihrer Voraussage in den astronomischen Jahrbüchern. Der Wasserdampf in der Luft hatte seine höchste Spannkraft, und die Feuchtigkeit der Luft war gering. Mit einem Wort, das das Tatsächliche recht gut bezeichnet, wenn es auch etwas altmodisch ist: Es war ein schöner Augusttag des Jahres 1913. (MoE 9)

By skimming off the imperceptible differences, one gains an average, a concept that allows one to speak and expect almost with certainty a beautiful August day. But not only the weather and the Isothermen are doing what they are supposed to, the celestial bodies and the cosmos follow the same course. What disrupts this harmony is the shifting viewpoint that falls from heaven to the city, where cultural motion bears only a slight resemblance to the cosmological realism of science. The city’s movement reveals artificial chaos with its swift expressionist pictures: “Autos schossen aus schmalen, tiefen Straßen in die Seichtigkeit heller Plätze” (MoE 9). The paradigm shifts from identity granted by the repetition of a concept – which makes weather forecast possible – towards a regularity gained from the resemblance of a set of traits that cannot be easily measured nor pinpointed. In the latter case, one should disregard the same and focus on a repetition’s intensive differences beyond a concept:

|| 78 According to Mülder-Bach, in the first chapter, Musil posits the world as a case or Fall, which in German refers not only to grammatical or forensic cases but also to symbolic or physical falling down. (Mülder-Bach, Robert Musil, 22) Moreover, the first chapter postulates that in Ulrich’s world the case is an accident or “Unfall”, not a perfect poietic endeavor but the construction of a world that is already there (50). Further scholars who mention how the first chapter defines the diegetic world are Altmann (Totalität und Perspektive, 167, 174), who draws attention to the relation between perspectival change and the manifoldness of a world with objects and feelings; Schmidt (Ohne Eigenschaften, 74–75); and Honold (Die Stadt und der Krieg, 16, 20, 81, 86, see specially 88), for whom the first chapter posits realism as the task of constructing a world and a unified spatio-temporal framework.

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An diesem Geräusch, ohne daß sich seine Besonderheit beschreiben ließe, würde ein Mensch nach jahrelanger Abwesenheit mit geschlossenen Augen erkannt haben, daß er sich in der Reichshaupt- und Residenzstadt Wien befinde. Städte lassen sich an ihrem Gang erkennen wie Menschen. Die Augen öffnend, würde er das gleiche an der Art bemerken, wie die Bewegung in den Straßen schwingt, bei weitem früher als er es durch irgendeine bezeichnende Einzelheit herausfände. (MoE 9)

Neither a specific pitch nor its timbre, but a bundle of intensities intersecting with each other and creating a commotion, rhythm is what someone can identify and remember from a metropole. Its clamour is a by-product of its characteristic pace, a carriage impossible to boil down to an attribute or an essence that would define or explain the movements within a big city. Its arteries are transited by autonomous individuals whose ability to walk is analogous to the city’s rhythmic but acephalous breathing. In this description, recognition is not concomitant with a mental comparison between our knowledge of a city and what is seen. Rather, the city’s performance is apprehended through an ability that identifies the city even before its particular traits are noticed. Hence, the question of whether one does or does not have an attribute is reformulated into a question revolving around how something is done and understood.79 Although everybody is entitled to a mental life and even a city as an organism might have some hidden social mechanisms resembling volition, a skeptical position encourages us not to disassociate considering from executing and puzzles us when we have to speculate about the intentions behind a city’s “antic disposition.” This first cameo of Kakania reminds us of Hamlet’s riddling behaviour and of the fact that the only reliable source upon which to build a judgment is the observable, but here is an observable that invites us to delve into its intensities and discover its immanent principle. Instead of talking about a set of inner items from which actions spring, we can only talk roughly and tentatively about dispositions which are impossible to consider independently of their actualizations. Even a habit, despite its automatization, cannot be something mindless or the reaction of an acquired attribute.80

|| 79 Ryle, The Concept of Mind, 16–18. 80 Ryle, The Concept of Mind, 22. “Just as the habit of talking loudly is not itself loud or quiet, since it is not the sort of term of which ‘loud’ and ‘quiet’ can be predicated, or just as a susceptibility to headaches is for the same reason not itself unendurable or endurable, so the skills, tastes and bents which are exercised in overt or internal operations are not themselves overt or internal, witnessable or unwitnessable.” See also 30.

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In the first chapter, the reflections upon the phrase “a nice August day” show how the focus on performance also disrupts an orientation method based on knowing that something can be identifiable in a unified spatio-temporal framework and referred to with a word: Die Überschätzung der Frage, wo man sich befinde, stammt aus der Hordenzeit, wo man sich die Futterplätze merken mußte. Es wäre wichtig, zu wissen, warum man sich bei einer roten Nase ganz ungenau damit begnügt, sie sei rot, und nie danach fragt, welches besondere Rot sie habe, obgleich sich das durch die Wellenlänge auf Mikromillimeter genau ausdrücken ließe; wogegen man bei etwas so viel Verwickelterem, wie es eine Stadt ist, in der man sich aufhält, immer durchaus genau wissen möchte, welche besondere Stadt das sei. Es lenkt von Wichtigerem ab. (MoE 9–10)

To enquire after a city’s identifiable traits or even its name has become a question without actual purpose. In the industrial present, there is no need to communicate where the resources for survival are, but rather who possesses them. It even seems a category mistake to ask this question regarding a city, a mistake grounded in the presupposition that toponymy entails descriptions, like when we talk about a red nose. Maybe everybody has an image of red that pops up in their mind when the word is uttered, or we could even be standing in front of said red nose, so there is no need to specify to which segment of the wavelength it belongs. “Red” is something that can be imagined, but a city seems to be a notion whose name does not carry any reconstructable trait leading to an image. It does not refer to a segment of the wavelength and thus cannot be anchored in the sensual with the help of our imagination. For this reason, the narrator advises: Es soll also auf den Namen der Stadt kein besonderer Wert gelegt werden. Wie alle großen Städte bestand sie aus Unregelmäßigkeit, Wechsel, Vorgleiten, Nichtschritthalten, Zusammenstößen von Dingen und Angelegenheiten, bodenlosen Punkten der Stille dazwischen, aus Bahnen und Ungebahntem, aus einem großen rhythmischen Schlag und der ewigen Verstimmung und Verschiebung aller Rhythmen gegeneinander, und glich im ganzen einer kochenden Blase, die in einem Gefäß ruht, das aus dem dauerhaften Stoff von Häusern, Gesetzen, Verordnungen und geschichtlichen Überlieferungen besteht. (MoE 10)

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A name is only the container for chemical reactions that take place independently – to some degree at least – from its flask.81 These physical boundaries do not affect the results. However, a city is far from providing the controlled and sterile conditions for an experiment. Its name stands rather for the cauldron inside an athanor, a vessel that is an alloy cast combining residues of tradition. A city’s name unfolds a semantic field and a sediment threatening to overshadow the actual experience of orientating oneself in the world. The regularities that give life to a metropolis allow us to speak about its character, and even handle “character” as the word that contains but cannot encompass its internal expressions. It refers thus to the process of predicting, explaining and modifying semi-hypotheses.82 This skeptical approach through lawlike statements undermines the attempt to regain autonomy through internalizations, since fashion has superseded the authority of tradition and internalizations are unmasked as farces grounded in a process in which one endows items with a meaning and then wears these items to acquire said attribute.83 Any conviction and certainty regarding one’s own position in society does not spring from the divine and embodied right an emperor has to establish an order in the world. Instead, it seems to be a narcissistic assurance of the privileged individuals who overlook the broad societal mechanism: Die beiden Menschen, die darin eine breite, belebte Straße hinaufgingen, hatten natürlich gar nicht diesen Eindruck. Sie gehörten ersichtlich einer bevorzugten Gesellschaftsschicht an, waren vornehm in Kleidung, Haltung und in der Art, wie sie miteinander sprachen, trugen die Anfangsbuchstaben ihrer Namen bedeutsam auf ihre Wäsche gestickt, und ebenso, das heißt nicht nach außen gekehrt, wohl aber in der feinen Unterwäsche ihres Bewußtseins, wußten sie, wer sie seien und daß sie sich in einer Haupt- und Residenzstadt auf ihrem Platze befanden. (MoE 10)

|| 81 With an analysis of the solecism used to introduce the names of Anrheim and Erlmelinda Tuzzi, Mülder- Bach argues that fictionality is also addressed in this chapter. Mülder-Bach, Robert Musil, 46. 82 Ryle, The Concept of Mind, 108. 83 “Solche Gegenstände gleichen Schuldnern, die den Wert, den wir ihnen leihen, mit phantastischen Zinsen zurückzahlen, und eigentlich gibt es nichts als Schuldnerdinge. Denn jene Eigenschaft der Kleidungsstücke besitzen auch Überzeugungen, Vorurteile, Theorien, Hoffnungen, der Glaube an irgendetwas, Gedanken, ja selbst die Gedankenlosigkeit besitzt sie, sofern sie nur kraft ihrer selbst von ihrer Richtigkeit durchdrungen ist. Sie alle dienen, indem sie uns das Vermögen leihen, das wir ihnen borgen, dem Zweck, die Welt in ein Licht zu stellen, dessen Schein von uns ausgeht, und im Grunde ist nichts anderes als dies die Aufgabe, für die jeder sein besonderes System hat.” (MoE 526)

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For both these upper-class citizens, proper names are secondary, a mere appendix and distinguishing trait of a world in which the symbolic and material plane are in harmony, that is, in which attire and posture, stance and gestures evince their rank and reaffirm the social order from which they benefit. Their privileged position motivates them to ground their ethics – in the sense of assessing human agency – in the status quo, in knowing that the world is such. This position contradicts the reflections advanced previously and reveals that ethics in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften becomes a dispute between discourses and their scope, a conflict thematized with the technical knowledge that disenchants the world: “Die Dame fühlte etwas Unangenehmes in der HerzMagengrube, das sie berechtigt war für Mitleid zu halten. Der Herr sagte nach einigem Schweigen zu ihr: ‘Diese schweren Kraftwagen, wie sie hier verwendet werden, haben einen zu langen Bremsweg.’ Die Dame fühlte sich dadurch erleichtert und dankte mit einem aufmerksamen Blick” (MoE 11). In this description of how someone copes with the world, the discomfort was tamed with an explanation that calms the body. First, there is no immediate reaction to an accident. The body signals that the event was worthy of some compassion, or that it is compassion that she feels and not just an idea of it. But this feeling’s weight wanes after Arnheim – who seems to have recognized the discomfort in her countenance – comforts her in an almost Shandean nonsensical way: he allocates the weight of the event on the vehicle. His words might sound out of context, but reveal that the accident was a possible outcome and one could have prevented it perhaps if the man who was run down had known that the “braking-distance” for this vehicle was too long. But what if the injured person is the same flâneur that on the previous page was trying to orientate himself in the city? This would mean that he utterly failed and was hit by a truck. He is accountable for the accident because he failed to fulfil the primeval need to orientate himself.84 Instead of recognizing the city using a skill and his knowhow in order to navigate the streets – which by the way requires a Herculean

|| 84 In her analysis of this chapter, Mülder-Bach mentions that the narrative voice establishes a case with a language impregnated by the theory of probability, but at the same time the intertextuality creates disruptions by introducing competing modal verbs and draws attention to the ankylosed knowledge. See Mülder-Bach, Robert Musil, 53–54. Her reading of the accident is this: “Die Bewegung setzt an dem an, was der Fall gewesen sein wird, sich aber noch nicht abzeichnet, und führt über die Stationen einer Möglichkeit, die (gewesen) sein könnte, aber noch nicht (gewesen) ist und einer negierte Hypothese, deren Negation voraussetzt, dass etwas anderes ist, zu dem, was im Unfall der Fall war.” (58)

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amount of energy, according to the novel – ,85 he was rather seduced by the question regarding its name, a question that “lenkt von Wichtigerem ab” (MoE 9–8). Perhaps he inquires after a name hoping that knowing that the city is called so and so would grant control over the named, but that kind of consolation seems to miss its target by explaining human behaviour through deterministic mechanical systems.86 It was not fate. The flâneur’s ability to actively control his way of rendering the world intelligible is what makes him accountable. If he survives and sues the driver, the story he chooses will decide the trial. From a disenchanted world’s perspective: “Er war durch seine eigene Unachtsamkeit zu Schaden gekommen, wie allgemein zugegeben wurde” (MoE 10). Either that, or he ignored the laws of mechanics because he was overwhelmed by the surrounding artificial contraptions and their complex regularities, by the traffic that reveals an order to tame with probability like an atmospheric phenomenon.87 He simply hesitated between different symbolic orders, between modern and medieval cosmologies, between a gravitational force that pulls everything towards earth in a vertical axis, and the truck’s weight thrusted by a motor over the horizontal line. He ended up in an accident that threatens the homogeneity of any of those symbolic orders.88

|| 85 If my interpretation holds, then it means that, from the beginning, the novel juggles with the idea of a way of orientating oneself in the world not based on a unified spatio-temporal framework, but on a skill, on thinking as a performance involving body and mind. This manner of recognizing is fundamental for Ryle’s approach on mind and body relations and the claims that can be raised about them. After explaining recognition with a musical example, he concludes that it is to do something, that is, thinking “in a special frame of mind” Ryle, The Concept of Mind, 205–207. 86 Eisele considers the introductory chapter as a microcosm of the macrocosm that the novel will develop. In the first chapter, the anonymous view of the third person narrator is challenged with an accident that sets the narration in motion, and even motivates Arnheim to advance an explanation mode. Eisele, “Ulrichs Mutter ist doch ein Tintenfass”, 163–165. 87 “Schon der meteorologische Lagebericht hat es mit Schwere (gr. baros), nämlich mit barometrischen Verhältnissen im Gravitationsfeld der Erde zu tun. Während ein barometrisches Minimum nur steigen kann, kann ein barometrisches Maximum nur fallen.” Mülder-Bach, Robert Musil, 60. 88 “Diese phantastische Herabkunft folgt den Gesetzen der Gravitation und hebt sie für einen Moment auf. Denn was hier zu Fall kommt, ist die Schwere selbst. Ein solcher Fall ist weder im mechanischen Universum Newtons noch in der gekrümmten Raumzeit Einsteins vorhergesehen. Dagegen erinnert er nicht nur an die alte kosmologische-theologische Spekulation, nach der die Neigung der Erdachse auf den Sündenfall zurückzuführen ist.” Mülder-Bach, Robert Musil, 60. See also 69.

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3.4 The ineffable origins of a character trait The metropolis that confronts the flâneur or leads him to a traffic accident raises the question of the explanation regimes employed to orientate oneself and understand events. Equally, it raises the question of the relationship between such explanations and an individual’s personality. In this subchapter, I will delve into the mutual origin of explanations and character traits in Tristram Shandy. The crucial assumption here is that “the imputation of a motive for a particular action is not a causal inference to an unwitnessed event but the subsumption of an episode proposition under a law-like proposition. It is therefore analogous to the explanation of reactions and actions by reflexes and habits, or to the explanation of the fracture of the glass by reference to its brittleness.”89 To understand brittleness or tristramness it is necessary to focus on the cultural and symbolic instead of on the causal links. It is at this point that the inquiry after character falls into the narrative domain. The shift from explaining to understanding, from a causal to a motivic framework, abstains from ascribing “innerlife precursors of overt actions.” Instead, it focuses on understanding in relation to the competence needed to perform something, which does not entail the ability to explain it nor a ghost fusion, resonance, or harmony between “insulated ghosts.” 90 Tristram’s narrative endeavors seek such an understanding by establishing that his life began not somewhere nor sometime, but somehow. Rather than pinpointing punctual elements, his narrative revolves around circumstances and shows the peculiar manner in which irrationality, symbolic forms, and moral character affect each other. Similarly, these topics are paramount for Ulrich’s fundamental question about how to orientate oneself in the world. Therefore, the “how” corresponds in both novels to a hylomorphic approach as well as to character construction as a means to understand a worldview, its relation to tradition, and its implied practical field. A character’s perspective represents thus a differential function arising form the world’s indeterminateness and creating a world, positing a case, but at the same time becoming them|| 89 Ryle, The Concept of Mind, 76. 90 Ryle, The Concept of Mind, 41, 42. This type of apprehension needs a narrative style aware of its own “bias or carelessness. My reports on myself are subject to the same kinds of defects as are my reports on you, and the admonitions, corrections and injunctions which I impose on myself may show me to be as ineffectual or ill-advised as does my disciplining of others. Selfconsciousness, if the word is to be used at all, must not be described on the hallowed paraoptical model, as a torch that illuminates itself by beams of its own light reflected from a mirror in its own insides.” (174)

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selves a point or case of the experienced continuum formed by multiple perspectives.91 Each perspective can be legitimized by attestation, that is, by knowledge spread throughout the whole iterative linguistic process employed to develop an ethical life plan;92 it hinges on habit which is depicted, or on a depicting habit. But instead of thinking of a generalizing link, habit posits series that align performances, one dot after another, to form a line. In this manner, it gives rise to a form of representation that solidifies the lived and constitutes experience. For this reason, mental and physical habits as recurrent gesticulations originate in the protagonist’s ruling passion and can be construed in two different ways. A causal explanation might define them as the expression of the same trait, as the repetition of the same, whereas a skeptical stance regarding certainty about other minds and the ascription of attributes allows us to construe any performance as actualizations – gestures whose repetition create an order in the world – pinned to the insubstantial and translucent “character.” This figure of thought lacks content or silhouette and is rather a scaffold that does not refer to a concept under which to subsume expression. It serves as a compass that appears only with enactment, and every iteration brings about an individuation through difference that opens, with every variation, a virtuality positing sense and non-sense. Sterne’s characters progressively create a world that disregards questions about truth and the bivalence principle. Their plea for understanding and the progressive acquaintance with the Shandean follies gradually transforms their nonsense into sense and reveals a virtual plane positing physical laws, possibilities, and probabilities.93

|| 91 Deleuze, Différence et répétition, 69. The idea of a perspective in relation to an identity’s selfhood is what allows us to see character as the principle beyond identity that grounds representation and revolves around Deleuze’s claim that “C’est que, en dernier ressort, la représentation infinie ne se dégage pas du principe d’identité comme présupposé de la représentation. C’est pourquoi elle reste soumise à la condition de la convergence des séries chez Leibniz, et à la condition du monocentrage des cercles chez Hegel.” (70) 92 Ricœur, Soi-même comme un autre, 136, 202–211. “L’attestation, en effet, a pour premier visà-vis l’articulation de la réflexion sur l’analyse, au sens fort que la philosophie analytique a donné à cette notion. C’est l’être-vrai de la médiation de la réflexion par l’analyse qui, à titre premier, est attesté.” (348) “ce dont elle dit l’être-vrai, c’est le soi ; et elle le fait à travers les médiations objectivantes du langage, de l’action, du récit, des prédicats éthiques et moraux de l’action.” (350) 93 For gestures and repetition, see Deleuze, Différence et répétition, 28, 101. For sense and nonsense, see 199. For modal regime, see 272, 273.

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But when does a trait becomes a habit and part of an ethos as gateway to intelligibility? Toby Shandy’s relationship with language, theories, and meaningful events offers an answer to this question. A character that explains the world by means of its hobbyhorsical obsession will probably repeat the same pattern and be baffled by duplications. However, duplication is an apparent problem for Toby Shandy since the changing circumstances – instead of the repetition of essential features – define a case and allude to an indeterminate core that includes the inessential.94 The hobbyhorse stands for a matrix that translates the world into its own terms. Any new cases or iterations both expand the scope of the perspective and evince its limits.95 For instance, The common men, who know very little of fortification, confound the ravelin and the halfmoon together,—tho’ they are very different things;—not in their figure or construction, for we make them exactly alike, in all points;—for they always consist of two faces, making a salient angle, with the gorges, not straight, but in form of a crescent:——Where then lies the difference? (quoth my father, a little testily).—In their situations, answered my uncle Toby:—For when a ravelin, brother, stands before the curtin, it is a ravelin; and when a ravelin stands before a bastion, then the ravelin is not a ravelin;—it is a half-moon;—a half-moon likewise is a half-moon, and no more, so long as it stands before its bastion;—— but was it to change place, and get before the curtin,—’twould be no longer a half-moon; a

|| 94 “C’est l’inessentiel, en vertu de l’infiniment petit, qui est maintenant posé comme espèce et comme genre, et qui se termine à ce titre dans la ‘quasi-espèce opposée’ : ce qui signifie qu’il ne contient pas l’autre en essence, mais seulement en propriété, en cas. […] Ce procédé de l’infiniment petit, qui maintient la distinction des essences (en tant que l’une joue par rapport à l’autre le rôle de l’inessentiel), est tout à fait différent de la contradiction ; aussi faut-il lui donner un nom particulier, celui de ‘vice-diction’. Dans l’infiniment grand, l’égal contredit l’inégal, pour autant qu’il le possède en essence, et se contredit lui-même pour autant qu’il se nie lui-même en niant l’inégal. Mais dans l’infiniment petit, l’inégal vice-dit l’égal, et se vice-dit lui-même, pour autant qu’il inclut en cas ce qui l’exclut en essence. L’inessentiel comprend l’essentiel en cas, tandis que l’essentiel contenait l’inessentiel en essence.” Deleuze, Différence et répétition, 66. 95 “Tous deux ensemble rapportent la différence, à la fois comme différence infiniment petite et comme différence finie, à la raison suffisante en tant que fondement qui sélectionne, c’est-àdire qui choisit le monde le meilleur – le meilleur des mondes, en ce sens, implique bien une comparaison, mais n’est pas un comparatif ; chaque monde étant infini, c’est un superlatif qui porte la différence à un maximum absolu, dans l’épreuve même de l’infiniment petit. La différence finie est déterminée dans la monade comme la région du monde exprimée clairement, la différence infiniment petite comme le fond confus qui conditionne cette clarté. De ces deux manières, la représentation orgique médiatise la détermination, en fait un concept de la différence en lui assignant une ‘raison’.” Deleuze, Différence et répétition, 69.

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half-moon, in that case, is not a half-moon;—’tis no more than a ravelin.——I think, quoth my father, that the noble science of defence has its weak sides——as well as others. (II, xii, 129)

The different circumstances these words can convey allude to the difference beyond the concept that defines a ravelin and a half-moon as the same. Such difference results from a systematic extravagance that has overtaken a character. It lays roots in his mind until its ramifications seem like ornamental patterns, even duplications and iterations that end up in humorous displays: never quite creative, never quite the same: “Suivant Marx la répétition est comique quand elle tourne court, c’est-à-dire quand, au lieu de conduire à la métamorphose et à la production du nouveau, elle forme une sorte d’involution, le contraire d’une création authentique. Le travesti comique remplace la métamorphose tragique.”96 The hobbyhorsical variations provide a costume for any occasion, any object, or any thought, and they draw their productive energy from indeterminateness. In this respect, Tristram fiddles with silence and misunderstandings, and exploits the possibilities of the aposiopesis, which undermine the postulate about the world’s handles even before Walter can put his idea into words. An unbreakable world and solid foundation that won’t break into pieces when handled without care represents Walter’s pipe-dream of a stable state of affairs grounded in the sole powers of reason and its theoretical approaches: “[…] then the world stands indebted to the sudden snapping of my father’s tobacco-pipe for one of the neatest examples of that ornamental figure in oratory, which Rhetoricians stile the Aposiopesis.——Just Heaven! how does the Poco piu and the Poco meno of the Italian artists;—the insensible MORE OR LESS, determine the precise line of beauty in the sentence, as well as in the statute!” (II, vi, 115) Systems, worlds and pipes break all the same when under the right amount of pressure. Given that no handle is absolutely necessary97 and stable, Tristram advocates for the instability of the line of beauty, its ambiguity, its obscure sides and mysteries, all of which hint at aposiopesis. This rhetorical device is the point of inflexion or a pause in which somebody might resort to Sentiment for a

|| 96 Deleuze, Différence et répétition, 123. 97 Deleuze, Différence et répétition, 181. “En vérité, les concepts ne désignent jamais que des possibilités. Il leur manque une griffe, qui serait celle de la nécessité absolue, c’est-à-dire d’une violence originelle faite à la pensée, d’une étrangeté, d’une inimitié qui seule la sortirait de sa stupeur naturelle ou de son éternelle possibilité : tant il n’y a de pensée qu’involontaire, suscitée contrainte dans la pensée, d’autant plus nécessaire absolument qu’elle naît, par effraction, du fortuit dans le monde.”

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communication grounded in perception, but besides hinting at immediacy it is also gateway to variations: “——“My sister, mayhap,” quoth my uncle Toby, “does not choose to let a man come so near her ****.” Make this dash,—’tis an Aposiopesis.—Take the dash away, and write Backside,——’tis Bawdy.—Scratch Backside out, and put Cover’d way in, ’tis a Metaphor; […] “ (II, vi, 116). Aposiopesis grounds the critical relation to the traditional means with which one pursues a biographical account that suspends the judicial framework and turns to the relational understanding of the self as other. But its tragic destiny is to become a parody. Variations without original transform reference into decorum, into a metaphor or a bawdy joke, and all “the exclamations, the apostrophe form, and certainly the repetition of both words and syntactical structure not only constitute an appropriate style for a narrator who finds aposiopesis in an ordinary conversation, but they also emphasize by exaggeration the ironic clash between art and nature that is at the root of this humorous episode.”98 Style and its variations allude to a broader theoretical framework. Every performance instantiates its own necessity and, only for an instant, it projects a homogenous world. In other words, the hobbyhorse or the “forms” that define the world-making of someone like Tristram or Ulrich are diverse doings intimately related to something that might start like a mood to become the chronic tincture that “colours all or most of his actions and reactions […]. In saying that he is in a certain mood we are saying something fairly general; not that he is all the time or frequently doing one unique thing, or having one unique feeling, but that he is in the frame of mind to say, do and feel a wide variety of loosely affiliated things.”99 Indeed, moral character stands for a far more complicated mindset in which various tendencies cohabit and seek their simultaneous furtherance,100 so the hobbyhorse in Sterne’s novel is a literary contraption depicted as an obsession and disposition. To be possessed by a hobbyhorse is like having a theory, in the sense that “the possessor of a theory is prepared to state it or otherwise apply it.”101 For instance, “to be a Newtonian was not just to say what Newton had said, but also to say and do what Newton would have said and

|| 98 Farrell, “Nature Versus Art as a Comic Pattern”, 18. Aposiopesis partially adopts its classic function, since “it is the strangest and most topsy-turvy aposiopesis in rhetorical history. Traditionally this figure denotes an abrupt break in the oration, indicating strong emotion on the part of the speaker.” (17) 99 Ryle, The Concept of Mind, 84. 100 Ryle, The Concept of Mind, 84. 101 Ryle, The Concept of Mind, 261.

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done.”102 Acquired knowledge and the attainable conclusions are part of a performance. In a similar vein, the hobbyhorse acquires a life of its own. It emancipates itself from the original idea that thrusted it into being, and will never be satiated: “It is the nature of an hypothesis, when once a man has conceived it, that it assimilates every thing to itself, as proper nourishment; and, from the first moment of your begetting it, it generally grows the stronger by every thing you see, hear, read, or understand” (II, xiv, 177). Hypothesis stands here for any theoretical framework that, if not halted at the door by the minds’s watchman: “after a free and undisturbed entrance, for some years, into our brains,—at length claim a kind of settlement there,——working sometimes like yeast;—but more generally after the manner of the gentle passion, beginning in jest,—but ending in downright earnest” (I, xix, 61). While all items in the world can affect us and become meanders in the sinuous mental path for a hobbyhorse to thread its way through, all ideas, likewise, are prone to take up quarters in any corner of the mind and spend their time defining their goals and making plans. But the bottom line is that the hobbyhorse expands the scope of a theory and the needed coherence that makes it inflexible and blind to further meanings. Theories in Tristram Shandy and in Der Man ohne Eigenschaften become part of moral character. They chart the world’s handles and represent the challenge of assimilating the world through repetition, which is not only the mental endeavour to subsume everything under a concept, but an observable phenomenon that affects behaviour and, consequently, is inseparable from its performance. This is the reason why the hobbyhorse, the downscaled version that exemplifies how one acquires insight into human nature and becomes a good judge of character, must and will move: Indeed, the gait and figure of him was so strange, and so utterly unlike was he, from his head to his tail, to any one of the whole species, that it was now and then made a matter of dispute,——whether he was really a Hobby-Horse or no: but as the Philosopher would use no other argument to the Sceptic, who disputed with him against the reality of motion, save that of rising up upon his legs, and walking across the room;—so would my uncle Toby use no other argument to prove his Hobby-Horse was a Hobby-Horse indeed, but by getting upon his back and riding him about;—leaving the world, after that, to determine the point as it thought fit. In good truth, my uncle Toby mounted him with so much pleasure, and he carried my uncle Toby so well,——that he troubled his head very little with what the world either said or thought about it.

|| 102 Ryle, The Concept of Mind, 252. For performance, see 265.

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It is now high time, however, that I give you a description of him:—But to go on regularly, I only beg you will give me leave to acquaint you first, how my uncle Toby came by him. (I, xxiv, 87)

Knowing how Toby became obsessed with sieges will shed some light on the theory that drives his performance. The traumatic episode that inaugurates a series and its repetitions is the instant in which a theory, an approach through observable behaviour, a good dose of speculation about another’s mind, and the habit that delineates the handles with incidence in the world converge. Repetitions have – incidentally conveniently for this context – two sides. They appear before us as both attired and nude. Actions can never be exactly repeated, but if one considers them as particular instances and variables of a general scheme, then there is a conceptual repetition. But beyond the concept there is the iterative endeavor of imagination that, with its contractions, solidifies the world’s handles: “La répétition est vraiment ce qui se déguise en se constituant, ce qui ne se constitue qu’en se déguisant. Elle n’est pas sous les masques, mais se forme d’un masque à l’autre, comme d’un point remarquable à un autre, d’un instant privilégié à un autre, avec et dans les variantes. Les masques ne recouvrent rien, sauf d’autres masques.”103 The world’s cohesive force resides in layers of meaning overlapping and such state of affairs can only be maintained with a continuous symbolic production, whose lingering remnants might resemble one another or appear as the same, but still embrace variations and change. Extrapolated to the question of character construction, a regular behaviour, a habit, for instance a gesticulation, is where Sameness and Selfhood come into contact. A movement, when repeated, demands a meaning and thus it becomes signified by the meaning that masks it.104 In a comparable

|| 103 Deleuze, Différence et répétition, 28. “Il est facile de multiplier les raisons qui rendent l’habitude indépendante de la répétition : agir n’est jamais répéter, ni dans l’action qui se monte, ni dans l’action toute montée. Nous avons vu comment l’action avait plutôt le particulier comme variable et la généralité pour élément. Mais s’il est vrai que la généralité est tout autre chose que la répétition, elle renvoie pourtant à la répétition comme à la base cachée sur laquelle elle se construit. L’action ne se constitue, dans l’ordre de généralité et dans le champ de variables qui lui correspondent, que par la contraction d’éléments de répétition.” (103) 104 “Il faudrait même renverser les rapports du ‘nu’ et du ‘vêtu’ dans la répétition. Soit une répétition nue (comme répétition du Même), par exemple un cérémonial obsessionnel, ou une stéréotypie schizophrénique : ce qu’il y a de mécanique dans la répétition, l’élément d'action apparemment répété, sert de couverture pour une répétition plus profonde, qui se joue dans une autre dimension, verticalité secrète où les rôles et les masques s’alimentent à l’instinct de mort. […] Partout c’est le masque, c’est le travesti, c’est le vêtu, la vérité du nu. C’est le masque, le véritable sujet de la répétition. C’est parce que la répétition diffère en nature de la représen-

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vein, the hobbyhorse is the mask and role, that is, the persona whose repetitions signify the world. At first glance, the traumatizing event from which the hobbyhorse originates might steal the spotlight of the repetition because “Sterne was alert to the importance of attaching trains of associated ideas to inadvertencies so that they might not appear simply arbitrary or futile. [...] The term ‘hobbyhorse’ embraces the relation between present trifles and past misfortunes; for Shandean singularity, [...], has its origin in a painful mischance.”105 However, calamities are inextricable due to surrounding circumstances and the available theories to explain them. According to the complex perspective represented by Tristram Shandy as self-reflective construction, origins are unreachable, but the endeavour to dress them up with stories is what endows them with meaning and plausibility. “Once an aetiology of eccentric or trifling behavior has been established, patterns of reconciled contraries start branching from the basic union between the painful impression at the beginning of the biography and the customary forms of thought and activity deriving from it.”106 The nonsensical present acquires sense when pulled by the gravitational force of the past. This way it generates iterations, flirts with predictions and destiny, and promises a Shandean rationality: “When this point is reached, simply to ride the hobbyhorse is sufficient justification of the value of the activity, for deeds are perfectly continuous with intentions and speech is a transparent medium of the heart.”107 This repetitive process entails a moment of disclosure. It is an instant which does not establish an origin, but simply the methodological handle that becomes visible when attention slows down and, in the middle of its wanderings, tries to stabilize the world, to make it manageable. A blink of an eye is when one might select which of our multiple personas should confront the events and decide on a course of action. Now, if there is one instant framing a worldview, it is the accident that befell Toby in the siege of Namur. It left him bed-ridden for almost four years and under the care of his brother. The whole experience, from its bleak beginnings to the physical recovery, shaped his life and defined his mode of explanation. It is an example for “whoever has read Hippocrates, or Dr. James Mackenzie, and has considered well the effects which the passions and affections of the mind

|| tation, que le répété ne peut être représenté, mais doit toujours être signifié, masqué par ce qui le signifie, masquant lui-même ce qu’il signifie.” Deleuze, Différence et répétition, 28–29. 105 Lamb, Sterne’s Fiction, 40. 106 Lamb, Sterne’s Fiction, 40. 107 Lamb, Sterne’s Fiction, 42.

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have upon the digestion—(Why not of a wound as well as of a dinner?)—may easily conceive what sharp paroxisms and exacerbations of his wound my uncle Toby must have undergone upon that score only” (II, i, 95). The effects here are symbolic and not physically connected to Toby’s wound, since he did not have a limp or a pain taxing his mood. Furthermore, “Twas not by ideas,—by Heaven; his life was put in jeopardy by words” (II, i, 101). The first symptoms appeared during his first year in bed. They started after “many discourses and interrogations about the siege of Namur, where he received his wound” (II, I, 93). It seems that when all his acquaintances payed him a visit to inquire after his well-being and wish him a quick recovery, “where he received his wound” became a common topic. And since he always answered with a very complicated retelling of the siege of Namur that confounded everybody, suddenly a thought came into his head, that if he could purchase such a thing, and have it pasted down upon a board, as a large map of the fortification of the town and citadel of Namur, with its environs, it might be a means of giving him ease.—I take notice of his desire to have the environs along with the town and citadel, for this reason,—because my uncle Toby’s wound was got in one of the traverses, about thirty toises from the returning angle of the trench, opposite to the salient angle of the demi-bastion of St. Roch:——so that he was pretty confident he could stick a pin upon the identical spot of ground where he was standing on when the stone struck him. (II, i, 96)

Only a map, a very common tool for the military, could aid him, since “his recovery depending, as you have read, upon the passions and affections of his mind, it behoved him to take the nicest care to make himself so far master of his subject, as to be able to talk upon it without emotion” (II, iii, 101). And still, he may be able to talk about the location, but the exact place and nature of the actual wound is still a mystery for Shandean scholarship because when Toby, in one of his books about projectiles, “perceived that the parameter and semiparameter of the conic section, angered his wound, he left off the study of projectiles in a kind of a huff, and betook himself to the practical part of fortification only; […] “ (II, iv, 105). It was not due to eccentricity, which in mathematics defines a conic’s section deviation from the circle, but “section” in the sense of severing that made the phallic resemblance unpalatable for Toby, causing him to block, from that time onwards, any conic associations to the mysterious nature of his wound. He does not wish to discuss his own eccentricity. However, one should bear in mind that he left projectiles almost to the end of his fourth year of recovery. Before, he was making good progress in understanding the mechanics of artillery, because the medic’s explanation piqued him:

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He was four years totally confined,—part of it to his bed, and all of it to his room; and in the course of his cure, which was all that time in hand, suffer’d unspeakable miseries,— owing to a succession of exfoliations of the oss pubis, and the outward edge of that part of the coxendix called the oss illeum,——both which bones were dismally crush’d, as much by the irregularity of the stone, which I told you was broke off the parapet,—as by its size,—(tho’ it was pretty large) which inclined the surgeon all along to think, that the great injury which it had done my uncle Toby’s groin, was more owing to the gravity of the stone itself, than to the projectile force of it,—which he would often tell him was a great happiness. (I, xxv, 88)

The medic’s soothing words remind us of how Arnheim tried to offer some consolation to Diotima by demystifying the accident they witnessed through statistics of traffic accidents and an explanation of the vehicle’s braking distance – too long, for the bad luck of the pedestrian.108 Both explanations lack empathy and in this case gravity is the main culprit, but since it is one of nature’s laws and lacks will, one cannot speak about guilt. It rather becomes part of an overdetermined causal system backed by an unmoved mover with a predilection for straight lines. However, there is another element muddling this picture’s harmony: “the irregularity of the stone.” How can a stone be irregular since everything is part of a mechanical system and stones are shaped in all kinds of ways? This irregularity hints at the impossibility to find consolation through mechanical explanations and reveals a disjointed world with blurred contours produced by the overlapping of two images. Although never thematized by Toby, the explanatory force of gravity starts to wane after a discovery that marks a shift towards irregularity or minimal deviations: Towards the beginning of the third year, which was in August, ninety-nine, my uncle Toby found it necessary to understand a little of projectiles:—and having judged it best to draw his knowledge from the fountain-head, he began with N. Tartaglia, who it seems was the first man who detected the imposition of a cannon-ball’s doing all that mischief under the notion of a right line—This N. Tartaglia proved to my uncle Toby to be an impossible thing. ——Endless is the search of Truth. No sooner was my uncle Toby satisfied which road the cannon-ball did not go, but he was insensibly led on, and resolved in his mind to enquire and find out which road the ball did go: […] (II, iii, 103)

|| 108 Lamb argues that the medic fails to console Toby, in Sterne’s Fiction, 17.

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The endless search for truth begins the moment one realizes that a cannonball is not governed by the providential straight line and its transcendental framework is dismissed. Proving the absence of the straight line in the world’s mischiefs undermines the soothing idea that one cannot do anything against gravity but wait for things to fall. This lack of an ultimate explanatory framework and certainty becomes the creative drive behind Toby’s curiosity. What seems straight is bent and what seems bent is straight. The adagio engrained in Alberti’s construction of the central perspective is the seminal idea in the humanistic postulate of multiple gravitational centers, and it delivers Toby directly into the hands of his hobbyhorse. He tried to explain to himself, why did he have to suffer such an injury? What was the reason behind it? For which purpose he was obliged to set off afresh with old Maltus, and studied him devoutly.—He proceeded next to Galileo and Torricellius, wherein, by certain Geometrical rules, infallibly laid down, he found the precise part to be a Parabola—or else an Hyperbola,—and that the parameter, or latus rectum, of the conic section of the said path, was to the quantity and amplitude in a direct ratio, as the whole line to the sine of double the angle of incidence, formed by the breech upon an horizontal plane;—and that the semiparameter,——stop! my dear uncle Toby——stop!—go not one foot farther into this thorny and bewildered track,—intricate are the steps! intricate are the mazes of this labyrinth! intricate are the troubles which the pursuit of this bewitching phantom Knowledge will bring upon thee.—O my uncle;—fly—fly, fly from it as from a serpent. ——Is it fit——goodnatured man! thou should’st sit up, with the wound upon thy groin, whole nights baking thy blood with hectic watchings? (II, iii, 103–104)

The wound itself has become accessory to Toby’s interest and, if he were able to recover all the data from that scene and acquire enough acumen in the discipline, it would result evident for him why the stone had to fall exactly in that place. However, this still would not explain the stone’s irregularity, which perhaps might lead to a new paradigm, analogous to the shift from the straight line to the parabola. Such inquiry catapults Toby in a different realm, that of culture, of human causation and regularity of behavior. Although never stated, it seems that Toby can never be satisfied with his physical explanations because the irregularity of that grave stone depended on the use that it had. As part of a fortification, it was conceived and formed with an original purpose: to stay on its wall. But war came and tore it down. Now, Toby would never raise a finger against war or another person that might have moved the strings that lead to his wound. Tristram, on the other hand, has not learned only from Walter but also from Toby. Our narrator is aware that there are human actors on whom to allocate accountability. This story is instrumentalized by Tristram to exemplify why Toby’s obsession made Trim take the weights out of the window, the same win-

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dow to which Susannah took him to be accidentally circumcised. The shift from gravity to irregularities represents the growing interest in consolation, achieved only by understanding the salient features of somebody’s personality and of culture, or by realizing that, even though the original purpose for fortifications and bodies might be to withstand time, both will crumble; and windows not only let light in but can lead to wit-maiming accidents. The irregularities of human behavior and historical processes make certain actions morally impossible for a character, but their flimsy link to a corporeal cause, like Toby’s conic taboos, imply that the virtual can produce the real. The hobbyhorse as an immanent motor represents a virtuality that can be explained in terms of the quasi cause and its stoic roots: “les effets incorporels ne sont jamais causes les uns par rapport aux autres, mais seulement ‘quasi-causes’, suivant des lois qui expriment peut-être dans chaque cas l’unité relative ou le mélange des corps dont ils dépendent comme de leurs causes réelles. Si bien que la liberté est sauvée de deux façons complémentaires : une fois dans l’intériorité du destin comme liaison des causes, une autre fois dans l’extériorité des événements comme lien des effets. Ce pourquoi les Stoïciens peuvent opposer destin et nécessité.”109 Or, in the words of Slavoj Žižek: “In the emergence of the New, something occurs that cannot be properly described at the level of corporeal causes and effects. Quasi cause is not the illusory theater of shadows, like a child who thinks he is magically making a toy run, unaware of the mechanic causality that effectively does work—on the contrary, the quasi cause fills in the gap of corporeal causality.”110 In both novels, the moment in which the

|| 109 Gilles Deleuze, Logique du sens (France: Éditions de Minuit, 1969), 15. 110 Žižek, Organs without Bodies, 27: “The concept of quasi-cause is that which prevents a regression into simple reductionism: it designates the pure agency of transcendental causality. Let us take Deleuze’s own example from his Time-Image: the emergence of cinematic neorealism. One can, of course, explain neorealism by a set of historical circumstances (the trauma of World War II, etc.). However, there is an excess in the emergence of the New: neorealism is an Event which cannot simply be reduced to its material/historical causes, and the “quasi-cause” is the cause of this excess, the cause of that which makes an Event (an emergence of the New) irreducible to its historical circumstances. One can also say that the quasi-cause is the secondlevel, the meta-cause of the very excess of the effect over its (corporeal) causes. This is how one should understand what Deleuze says about being affected: insofar as the incorporeal Event is a pure affect (an impassive-neutral-sterile result), and insofar as something New (a new Event, an Event of/as the New) can only emerge if the chain of its corporeal causes is not complete, one should postulate, over and above the network of corporeal causes, a pure, transcendental, capacity to affect. This, also, is why Lacan appreciated so much The Logic of Sense: is the Deleuzian quasi-cause not the exact equivalent of Lacan's objet petit a, this pure, immaterial, spectral entity which serves as the object-cause of desire?”

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New emerges and posits new terms by which to explain and handle the world can be easily pinpointed in the physical grid, but the reality arising from that movement depends on the modal regime that translates intensities and is bounded to change like an hermeneutic process. The encroaching repetitions, which repress and reenact an event, are advanced by various forms of representation that diversify the truth regime in both novels. Their multiple instances are not only bound to different characters, but even a single character endows the world with different modal layers of truth, fiction, lies, and opinions, all of which are advanced in diverse genres. These stylistic features are consistent with the idea of infinite worlds and the immanent conception rooted in humanism. While, in the middle ages, the pontentia absoluta did not allow repetitions, in modernity, the constraint of an eidetic image appears as a constraint of God’s unlimited powers. And when the idea of multiple worlds and their “eccentric” or elliptical orbits fell within the humanist scope, they became habitable worlds related to the panoply of Selfconsciousnesses that evince God’s unquenchable intensive creation.111 Therein resides the pivotal function of emotions and perception in relation to mental life. In both novels, personal identity lies in the virtual. The characters of Tristram Shandy cling to each other despite all their misunderstandings, due to the fear of losing their Selves in words. Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften advances a character constellation that, in some cases, assumes itself to be a system with distinct individuals alluding to symbolic orders. Regardless of the given, there is always an excess at which both novels hint, by traversing individual perspectives and discourses. Each character colours the world by postulating the possible and impossible, necessity and contingency, so the most stable world or reality is where the perspectives intersect and lose their unconveyable meaning.112 The characters are the nodes that draw intensities from their intelligibility and filter the real through the virtual in order to add a symbolic supplement to actual reality.113 Perhaps biographies grant a partial, obfuscated view over these virtual planes, whose resonance made an incision in the world and resulted in a coura-

|| 111 Blumenberg, Die Legitimität der Neuzeit, 120–123. 112 Žižek, Organs without bodies, 4. 113 Both novels can be interpreted in terms of Žižek’s reading of the virtual: “actual reality is the real filtered through the virtual” (Žižek, Organs without bodies, 84) and while the virtual is a symbolic supplement “added to the pre-ontological real,” (84) the subjects are their filters or nodes that channel the immanent flow (68).

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geous deed or an insightful conclusion. For the characters, the act of representation means a passage through microcosms and the actualization of virtuality. It is the constant effort to stabilize their narrative identity by narrating, depicting, giving their opinions, enacting their hobbyhorse and becoming through repetition: Becoming is thus strictly correlative to the concept of REPETITION: far from being opposed to the emergence of the New, the proper Deleuzian paradox is that something truly New can only emerge through repetition. What repetition repeats is not the way the past “effectively was” but the virutality inherent to the past and betrayed by its past actualization. In this precise sense, the emergence of the New changes the past itself, that is, it retroactively changes not the actual past—we are not in science fiction—but the balance between actuality and virtuality in the past.114

To cope with affect and the past, Toby not only acquired knowledge from innumerable manuals of warfare, but became skilled in their enactment in his bowling green: “His way, which was the simplest one in the world, was this; as soon as ever a town was invested—(but sooner when the design was known) to take the plan of it (let it be what town it would), and enlarge it upon a scale to the exact size of his bowling-green; […] “ (VI, xxi, 535). By doing this, Toby crosses different planes of representation and can represent a world in a plan, a reduction to be enlarged later in his bowling green.115 For him, war, insofar as it is a theory, acquires the regularity of a natural phenomenon.116 However, a map or an image are products and play a secondary role. The relevant issue here is that they are part of the endeavor to orientate oneself and enable the affect flux and interrelationships to coalesce into a panoramic view that a further modal palette could negate. Toby’s maps are not fulfilling a referential function but attempt to meet, perhaps, his idiosyncratic idea of realism. Each representation, regardless of the medium, is a playful emanation of an || 114 Žižek, Organs without Bodies, 12. 115 Tristram Shandy is packed with repetitions that obfuscate the relation with an original and lead to foolish systems. For instance, the homunculus (I, ii, 2) that brings to mind the imperfection of a human-like being and maybe hints at the “pride” and idea of “self-sufficiency” that is also undermined with the hobbyhorse. (New, Laurence Sterne as a Satirist, 83–84.) The pride we take in our opinions and our ideas is a homuncular pride that owes its creativity to a similar immanent active principle. For this reason, the Tristrapedia (V, xvi, 445) that Walter promises to bequeath to Tristram to navigate wisely through the world is just an ideological duplication that promises to repeat, with each entry, Walter’s point of view, to advance yet another foolish system that Tristram will have to include in his Shaftesburyan quest for self-Knowledge. Bruni Roccia, “Sterne and Shaftesbury Reconsidered”, 72. 116 Moglen, The philosophical Irony of Laurence Sterne, 84–85.

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original idea or affect, which are impossible to limit to causal constraints and acquire presence through enactment. Construed as a game driven by affect, the emanating hobbyhorse is actualized with each representation, and by resorting to imagination it transforms the raw material used for its mimetic procedures, that is, for its mental activity that projects an image of the world.117 Despite the misunderstandings caused by unreliable sensual material, it is in the intensive field that Tristram seeks his individuality. His narrative endeavor undermines any stable attribute that could be correlated to an event that changed his body, so his narration is also an attempt to underscore the minimal difference that points to the intensive content, since “toute différenciation suppose un champ intense d’individuation préalable.”118 In the world of Sentiment, emotions are palpable and their uniqueness resides in the diverse intensities that leave an impression on body and mind. They serve as the fundament that determines the way to understand an event as going beyond physical laws. || 117 Here I try to summarize Guy Deniau’s paper. For the relationship between mimesis and emanation see 63. For the broeader approach through difference it would be interesting to reflect upon the gap that rises from the emergence of an image: “Einem theologischen Wortgebrauch folgend könnte man sagen, daß das Bild die innere Selbstdifferenzierung des Prinzips ist. Mit dem Unterschied, daß Gadamers phänomenologische Perspektive dazu einlädt, das Primat der Selbstdifferenzierung über das Prinzip zu setzen. Mit anderen Worten: das phänomenologische Prinzip, welches das Bild ist, gehört nicht in den Bereich der Ursache — und sei diese auch überwesentlich, summum ens —, und es ist nichts anderes als das Ereignis selbst der Anwesenheitskonfiguration, der Anwesenheit, indem sie sich ereignet. Darin ist das Bild Bedingung der Möglichkeit und nicht entitative Grundlegung, actus essendi. Gerade deshalb ist seine Anwesenheit im Seinsganzen ein Entzug des Ganzen aus dem Sein. Hier liegt die paradoxe Dialektik des Bildes: anwesend in allem, was erscheint, ist das Bild in allem ein Ganzes aber nichts Bestimmtes, nichts Seiendes, es ist, um eine cusanische Wendung phänomenologisch aufzugreifen, das omnium nihil. Kurz, es ist es selbst nur unter der Bedingung, nicht das zu sein, was es ist, und zugleich das zu sein, was es nicht ist. Den Cusaner erneut paraphrasierend könnte man sagen, daß am Himmel nichts anderes als der Himmel ist.” Guy Deniau “Bild und Sprache: Über die Seinsvalenz des Bildes. Ästhetische und hermeneutische Folgerungen (GW I, 139–176)”, in Hans-Georg Gadamer. Wahrheit und Methode, ed. Günter Figal (Berlin: Akademie, 2007), 66. 118 “L’individu n'est ni une qualité ni une extension. L’individuation n’est ni une qualification ni une partition, ni une spécification ni une organisation. L’individu n’est pas une species infima, pas plus qu’il n’est un composé de parties. Les interprétations qualitatives ou extensives de l’individuation restent incapables de fixer une raison pour laquelle une qualité cesserait d’être générale, ou pour laquelle une synthèse d’étendue commencerait ici et finirait là. La qualification et la spécification supposent déjà des individus à qualifier ; et les parties extensives sont relatives à un individu, non pas l’inverse. […] l’individuation précède en droit la différenciation, [...] toute différenciation suppose un champ intense d’individuation préalable.” Deleuze, Différence et répétition, 318.

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The refraction index of a glassy essence; its brittleness, which aims beyond determinism and predictions to a potentiality; the origins that are identifiable in the causal system but unrelated to its consequences; and an individuation that draws its force from ungraspable intensities, all these elements ground a Menschenkenntnis. This Menschenkenntnis revolves around an experience of the Other through a relationality that does not linger in a boundless language but grapples with emotions. This experience seeks to self-reflexively conciliate the self with the other.119 Being in the middle of an event and openness are at the center of the apprehension of the Other and allow us to reflect upon character construction as a figure of thought that moves along these lines. Every new experience does not affirm but retroactively changes our memories and projects a horizon. “Daher ist derjenige, den man erfahren nennt, nicht nur durch Erfahrungen zu einem solchen geworden, sondern auch für Erfahrungen offen.”120 This open frame of mind indicates that an experience cannot repeat itself because it is constituted by difference, so the experienced person does not explain or see implications but roams through diverse actualizations, relying on pathos to discover intensities.121

|| 119 “Das Leben des Geistes besteht vielmehr darin, im Anderssein sich selbst zu erkennen. Der auf seine Selbsterkenntnis gerichtete Geist sieht sich mit dem ‘Positiven’ als dem Fremden entzweit und muß lernen, sich mit ihm zu versöhnen, indem er es als das Eigene und Heimatliche erkennt. Indem er die Härte der Positivität auflöst, wird er mit sich selbst versöhnt. Sofern solche Versöhnung die geschichtliche Arbeit des Geistes ist, ist das geschichtliche Verhalten des Geistes weder Selbstbespiegelung noch auch bloße formaldialektische Aufhebung der Selbstentfremdung, die ihm widerfahren ist, sondern eine Erfahrung, die Wirklichkeit erfährt und selber wirklich ist.” Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, 352. 120 Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, 361. 121 Regarding Aeschylus’ pathei-mathos Gadamer writes: “Er meint den Grund dafür, warum es so ist. Was der Mensch durch Leiden lernen soll, ist nicht dieses oder jenes, sondern ist die Einsicht in die Grenzen des Menschseins, die Einsicht in die Unaufhebbarkeit der Grenze zum Göttlichen hin.” Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, 362.

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Index agency 8–9, 17, 41–42, 46, 50, 104–105, 120, 187–188, 204, 207, 209, 211, 216, 219, 223, 259, 272, 274, 280, 309, 322 causality 10, 84, 101–103, 136, 183, 195, 233, 257, 263–264, 322 character construction 6–8, 11, 13, 18–19, 37, 61, 141, 161, 179, 209, 271–272, 280, 283, 290, 311, 317, 326 contingency 32, 48, 124, 139, 147, 173, 185, 218, 236, 246–247, 255, 258, 260, 296, 323 experiencing 90, 111, 119, 148, 209 immanent 19, 96, 98, 114, 120, 125, 135, 145, 149, 182, 199–200, 202, 205, 241, 244– 245, 264, 271–272, 275, 284, 288, 306, 322–324 – immanence 149, 155, 232, 263, 265, 281, 283 indeterminate 7, 226, 241, 246–247, 253, 291, 313 – indeterminateness 202, 212, 240, 252, 265, 267, 290 intelligible 65, 75–77, 81, 87–89, 99, 102– 104, 106, 130–131, 145, 176, 182, 202, 227, 252, 265, 273, 282, 285, 310

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110656947-006

– intelligibility 103, 143, 158, 202, 213, 216, 227, 236, 244, 262, 271, 313, 323 lead a life 17, 19, 21, 90, 98, 128–129, 148, 181, 191, 196 mental life 37 modernity 20, 91, 212, 241, 254, 264–265, 271, 323 necessity 5, 41, 48, 51, 57, 103, 123, 142, 146, 151, 191, 195, 197, 204, 211, 214, 221, 223, 252, 257, 272, 274, 287, 301, 315, 323 perception 56, 59, 68, 75, 77, 98, 119, 137, 153, 158, 180, 192–193, 198, 208, 218, 222, 229, 235, 257, 267, 292, 315, 323 performance 13, 89, 158, 218, 253, 275–276, 287, 306–307, 310, 312, 315–317 practical field 7–9, 105, 136, 311 practical reasoning 9–10, 24, 37, 55, 61, 100 rationale 75, 95, 98, 157, 195, 213, 226, 294 rationality 37, 91 transcendental 12, 19, 22, 96, 122, 149, 155, 190, 236, 239, 245, 271, 284, 321–322