5 - Musil's “Die Vollendung der Liebe”: Experience Analyzed and Reconstituted

Summary

The two stories in Musil's collection Vereinigungen (Unions), “Die Versuchung des stillen Veronika” (The Temptation of Quiet Veronika) and “Die Vollendung der Liebe” (The Perfecting of Love), were published in 1911. Publication mobilized strong feelings. One reviewer, Robert Müller, wrote of Musil's capacity to illuminate “[das] Zwielichtene, Verschleierte, Medusige, […] das molluskige Gewebe alles Lebenden” (the half-lit, veiled, insubstantially transparent […] the mollusk- like fabric of all that is living). However, the silence of Alfred Kerr, the critic who had helped to make Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß a literary success, was a more typical response to the book, for Musil had failed to pay attention to the difficulties that his readers would face. The work has continued to be a challenge: David Luft describes it as “Perhaps the most radical experiment in the sustained use of simile in modern prose.” Karl Corino writes of Musil's attempt: “die subtilsten Vorgänge in einem Menschen, zwischen ihm und seiner Umwelt ins Wort zu ziehen, um die Konstruktion einer Seelenmetaphysik jenseits von Psychologie und Theologie, um den Entwurf einer neuen Moral” (to find words for the most subtle processes within a human being, for what happens in the interaction of the individual and his surroundings, to construct a metaphysics of the psyche beyond psychology and theology — to draft a new morality). Corino notes how Musil expects his reader to slow down and concentrate, comparing the process to reading in the pre-Gutenberg era. The outcome of such implicit demands is a degree of confusion on the part of the reader that Musil ought to have anticipated.

The reader does not know what is going on in the pieces and what is expected of him or her. The clarity of much of Musil's prose elsewhere is missing here, but this is not for lack of hard work on Musil's part — he had made heavy demands on himself and invested no less than two and a half years in the two short narratives.