Gunther Martens: Observations of modernity in Hermann Broch’s The Sleepwalkers and Robert Musil’s The man without qualities. Rhetorical and narratological aspects of interdiscursivity. München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag (Musil-Studien; vol. 35). 344pp. (In German)

 

 

Broch and Musil have often been said to refashion or even explode the genre of the novel so as to accomodate a relativist epistemology, dissolving reality into perspectivism and plurivocity. 

 

This common perception is based on philosophical assumptions rather than on thorough textual inquiry. It begs the question why their main novels feature a prominent narratorial ‘frame’ that actively reveals characters as ideologically blinded or that offers alternative ways of observing events by means of hypothetical focalizations. In order to assess these authorial (and often very ironical) telling tactics, an alternative approach to meta- and authorially inflected narration is developed, since existing narratological terminologies (focussing on the fictionality status of texts) turn out to be very limited in scope and thoroughly normative to boot.

 

Broch’s and Musil’s prominent narrators need to be studied in the context of the crisis of the ideology-critical enterprise. The ambitions of Critical Theory as advanced by Frankfurt School theorists such as Adorno are confronted with an outlook that attempts to see modernity as an potentially positive challenge (as evidenced in Niklas Luhmann’s theory of modernity). This debate, though obviously posterior to Broch and Musil in historical terms, serves as a heuristic cue to highlight Broch’s and Musil’s divergent views on modernity.

 

Although strongly inviting definition in sociological, philosophical and political terms, the literary representation of modernity calls for a description of its argumentative and communicative dimension. As such, modernity can be treated a claim related to the process of autonomisation and functional differentiation of spheres, a claim voiced and addressed both with triumphant and apocalyptic overtones. The modernity as observed as by Broch and Musil highlights the communicative risk of being exposed to near-feudal practices, to anachronistic embodiments of near-absolute power, appropriation of signifiers etc. Both Musil’s and Broch’s narrators can be seen to frame and highlight the infelicity of institutional speech acts on the level of narrative and language (in ways that are often strongly reminiscent of the rhetorical expertise of Karl Kraus).

 

In addition to an extensive description of the narrative and stylistic characteristics of both authors, the study aims to show that authorial narration is in fact no longer an authoritative privilege but a risky undertaking in the modernist era. The gnomic and non-situated impetus of metadiscourse, already in itself often challenged and affected by the expanding scope of figural perspective and diction, can no longer rely on the plausibility of moral and pragmatic certainties; it needs to anticipate and address the anamnetic activity of the reader instead. Of striking importance to the development Broch’s and Musil’s stylistic experiments with of narratorial mediation is their early prose. Two case studies (on Broch’s Eine methodologische Novelle and Musil’s Triëdere) have been published separately, but can be read in accordance with the main thesis of this book. (Martens 2004; Martens 2005)

 

Subject terms: authorial narration; Austrian Literature; narratology; rhetoric; Franz K. Stanzel; Niklas Luhmann; irony; narrator; narrative technique; style; treatment of modernity; modernism; literary epistemology; interdiscursivity; metalanguage; performativity

 

 

On the author: Dr. Gunther Martens is Postdoctoral Research Assistant of the FWO - Flemish Research Foundation and a member of the German Department of Ghent University (Belgium).

 

References

 

Martens, Gunther: “Spielräume des auktorialen Diskurses in Hermann Brochs Eine methodologische Novelle”, in: Orbis Litterarum 59:4 (2004), S. 239-269.

 

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