Hermann Broch, Robert Musil, and the Novels of Interwar Vienna Richard M. Lambert III a Dissertati
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In Search of Lost Experience: Hermann Broch, Robert Musil, and the Novels of Interwar Vienna Richard M. Lambert III A dissertation submitted to the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures (German) Chapel Hill 2017 Approved by: Richard Langston Eric Downing Kata Gellen Malachi Hacohen Toril Moi Inga Pollmann © 2017 Richard M. Lambert III ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT Richard M. Lambert III: In Search of Lost Experience: Hermann Broch, Robert Musil, and the Novels of Interwar Vienna (Under the direction of Dr. Richard Langston) Characterized by themes of negation, fragmentation, and destruction, the novels of interwar Vienna are canonically read as a testament to the social and political shifts that reshaped Central Europe after the turn of the twentieth century—the upheaval of the fin-de-siècle, the devastation of WWI, and the fall of the monarchies. These canonical readings deny the modernist novel any sort of productive capacity. My dissertation, In Search of Lost Experience: Hermann Broch, Robert Musil, and the Novels of Interwar Vienna delivers a corrective to conventional understandings of the late modernist novel by pushing beyond this lament of crisis. In the Viennese interwar novels of Hermann Broch and Robert Musil, I locate a deeper agenda in the late modernist novel—the resuscitation of experience—which evidences the pinnacle of another Viennese modernism located around 1930. My dissertation examines the Musil’s Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß (1906) and Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (1930/32) and Broch’s Die Schlafwandler (1930) and Die unbekannte Größe (1932). I read these novels together with theories from philosophy, psychology, and science studies that range from Kant to Dilthey, Lukacs, Mach, Freud, Neurath, and Wittgenstein in order to investigate literature’s unique purchase on experience by reawakening language as use, production, non-semiotic communication, and literary experimentation. This alternative to the standard accounts of modernism contrasts against the celebrated Viennese fin-de-siècle, and frees interwar Viennese literature from the pneumatic iii literary-historical narrative of crisis that has defined scholarship on twentieth century Austrian literature since Claudio Magris (1966) and Carl Schorske (1980), which frame Viennese interwar literature as backward-looking reactions to the political, social, and linguistic crises of the pre- WWI era. My dissertation instead asserts that the search for experience designates these novels as productive sites of aesthetic and cultural orientation during the interwar period. iv To Christen, for making sure I hold up my end of the deal. v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This dissertation would never have taken shape without the guidance, support, and encouragement that I have received from so many individuals over the years. I am most deeply grateful to my advisor, Dr. Richard Langston, whose patience, support, and mentorship have kept me focused and inspired my belief in my self, and my project. I am thankful to Dr. Eric Downing for his leadership as Director of Graduate Studies, and for always taking an interest in my project and in me. I would also like thank Dr. Christina Wegel for ensuring my graduate school training was well-rounded and thorough. I am thankful to the many members of the Carolina-Duke German Studies Dissertation Colloquium, who have offered countless invaluable suggestions on my work over the years. I feel particularly indebted to Rory Bradley, Melanie Ungar, Erik Grell, Elizabeth Schreiber-Byers, Matthew Feminella, Tayler Kent, and Emma Woelk for their friendship and camaraderie. Thank you to the BTWH research network, and my colleagues at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institut für Geschichte und Gesellschaft. In particular, I must thank Erik Born, Ingo Zechner, Gabriel Trop, and Rob McFarland. And with deep thanks and fond memories of Dr. Siegfried Mattl, whose generous support brought me to Vienna, and who left a profound imprint on this dissertation. Thank you to my parents for their unconditional love and support, to my extended families for encouraging me to pursue this project. And thanks most of all to my wife Christen, for her unwavering support, love, and encouragement. And to Effi and Uli for helping keep things in perspective. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................................1 Experience...........................................................................................................................4 Fin-de-Siècle Vienna and the Crisis of Experience...........................................................18 Experience and Interwar Viennese Culture.......................................................................34 Overview of Dissertation...................................................................................................42 CHAPTER 1: OVERCOMING THE LANGUAGE CRISIS: DESIRING...................................44 EXPERIENCE IN ROBERT MUSIL’S DIE VERWIRRUNGEN DES ZÖGLINGS TÖRLEß Canonical Readings and the Value of Experience.............................................................49 Between Conceptuality and Concreteness: The Problem..................................................53 Of Parallel Lines Rationality and the Fin-de-Siècle Redefinition of Experience..........................................57 Bad Math and Experience as Form....................................................................................61 The Gleichnis and the Language of Similarity..................................................................66 Verwirrung and Rationality: Törleß’s Confusions and......................................................75 the Impossibility of Experience CHAPTER 2: “STARS IN THE WATER”: HERMANN BROCH’S..........................................84 DIE UNBEKANNTE GRÖßE AND THE ORDINARY LANGUAGE OF EXPERIENCE Mathematics, Modernism, and Kant: Die unbekannte Größe...........................................87 in Broch Scholarship vii Out of the Language Crisis: Mathematics and Adamic Language....................................90 Beyond the Word: Language as Social Signifier...............................................................98 Broch’s Theory of the Novel: Experience, Language, and Literature.............................107 The ‘Sterne im Wasser’ as Mîse-en-Abyme....................................................................113 CHAPTER 3: BETWEEN “NICHT MEHR” AND “NOCH NICHT”:......................................119 METAPHOR AND THE WEIGHT OF HISTORY IN HERMANN BROCH’S DIE SCHLAFWANDLER The Disintegration of Values and Historical Fiction.......................................................124 Pasenow and Historical Convention................................................................................129 Esch and the Failure of Metaphor....................................................................................133 The Total Novel?.............................................................................................................139 The Essay as Fiction........................................................................................................142 Order, Authorship, and the Disintegration of Values......................................................149 Beyond Decline: The Prison House of Language............................................................155 CHAPTER 4: EXPERIENCE WITHOUT QUALITIES:...........................................................160 PICTURE WRITING AND HISTORICAL NARRATION IN ROBERT MUSIL’S DER MANN OHNE EIGENSCHAFTEN Neurath, Wittgenstein, and Theories of the Image..........................................................165 Clear Images: Picture Writing and Musil’s Cultural Critique.........................................172 Discourse, Experience, and Writing History...................................................................182 The Blurred Image and Rewritten History.......................................................................189 CONCLUSION: VIENNESE MODERNISM AT THE..............................................................201 NEXUS OF EXPERIENCE BIBLIOGRAPHY........................................................................................................................207 viii INTRODUCTION From the first words of Robert Musil’s fledgling novel, Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß (1906), it is clear that language occupies a privileged but also problematic status in his work. Borrowing a quotation from Belgian symbolist Maurice Maeterlinck, Musil introduces the text by describing an inexpressible treasure, “sobald wir es aussprechen, entwerten wir es seltsam.”1 The problem of language persists through to the end of Musil’s oeuvre, exerting a formative influence in his masterpiece Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (1930/32). A contemporary of Musil, the early novels of Hermann Broch express a similar concern for the status of language. As Broch writes in his infamous essay “Hofmannsthal und seine Zeit” (1955), every historical period, “…stellt das Realitätsbild ihrer Zeit in deren spezifischem Vokabular dar.”2 While these two passages present differing critiques, with Musil questioning the essential expressive potential of language and Broch highlighting the proliferation of rhetoric and plurality, in both cases the registration