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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