Masochism and its limits in Robert Musil's 'Die Vollendung der Liebe'.

Publication: The Modern Language Review

Publication Date: 01-JUL-05

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This article analyses the theme of masochism in Musil's story 'Die Vollendung der Liebe'. It assesses whether the depiction of a masochistic female protagonist by a male narrator reinscribes a schematic gender polarity and the extent to which the story supports an understanding of masochism that sees it as a radical critique of coherence.

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The impenetrability and difficulty of Robert Musil's short story 'Die Vollendung der Liebe' encourage interpretations that tend towards philosophical and aesthetic abstraction and ignore the reality of the masochistic woman at its centre. (1) It is true that there is much justification for such approaches, for the story betrays little concern with events. As Musil cryptically has the Literat comment in his essay of 1913 'Uber Robert Musil's Bucher', 'Diese eine Frau wird ihrem Mann untreu, aus irgendeinem konstruierten Einfall heraus, dass dies die Vollendung ihrer Liebe bedeuten musse.' (2) The stages by which this woman, Claudine, reaches the point where she is willing to commit adultery with a man she does not find attractive are explored with only cursory references to the 'objective' external situation which indicate that she is, for example, in the train, looking out of the window, or talking to her daughter's teachers. It is indicative of the intense focus on Claudine's perceptions, and on her state of mind and emotions, that no reference is made to a meeting with her daughter, which is the reason for her journey away from her beloved husband in the first place. Furthermore, although the story almost exclusively portrays the psychic reality and development of the protagonist, Musil was not interested in depicting conventional patterns of psychological causality: 'Die Tendenz dieser Kunst verzichtet auf das Wissenschaftliche der Begrundung des Geschehens, ich habe mit Bewusstsein alles real Psychologische in den Untergrund gedrangt.' (3) His artistic exploration of this woman's inner life moves towards what he characterizes in his 1918 essay 'Skizze der Erkenntnis des Dichters' as the 'nicht-ratioides Gebiet'. This is the realm where the exception dominates the rule:

Die Tatsachen unterwerfen sich nicht auf diesem Gebiet, die Gesetze sind Siebe, die Geschehnisse wiederholen sich nicht, sondern sind unbeschrankt variabel und individuell. [...] [E]s [ist] das Gebiet der Reaktivitat des Individuums gegen die Welt und die anderen Individuen [...], das Gebiet der Werte und Bewertungen, das der ethischen und asthetischen Beziehungen, das Gebiet der Idee. (4)

This realm is juxtaposed to that of the 'ratioides Gebiet', which is the realm in which rules predominate, and which incorporates 'alles wissenschaftlich Systematisierbare, in Gesetze und Regeln zusammenfassbare [...]. Es ist gekennzeichnet [...] [v]or allen Dingen aber schon dadurch, dass sich die Tatsachen auf diesem Gebiet eindeutig beschreiben und vermitteln lassen' (ibid., pp. 1026-27).

In the movement away from systematization, the story is structured around images and comparisons, which, as Fred Lonker puts it, 'dienen [...] nicht der Umsetzung eines begrifflich fixierbaren Gehalts in konkrete Anschauung [...], sondern sie selbst enthalten das Gemeinte'. (5) Thus:

Der Vorgang, der sonst [...] in einer Reflexion od. in einem Geschehen zuhause ist, wird hiebei in exakter Verkurzung in ein Bild gedrangt. Und darumist dieses Bild nicht symbolisch, sondern [...] distinkt. Und es ist nicht parabolisch, sondern kategorisch, d.h. aussagend u erzahlend. (6)

This double movement of the story away from both event and psychological schematization has been variously interpreted, the critics focusing with differing degrees of emphasis on the obscurity of the language, on the obscurity of Claudine's betrayal as a perfection of love, and on how the two obscurities relate. On the whole, critics concur with the positive evaluation of Claudine's adultery suggested by the title, for she attains a subjectivity not based upon the containing, or restricting, expectations of her bourgeois lifestyle and marriage. Karl Corino sees the end of the story as a utopia, for, through eros, Claudine breaks through social convention to fulfil her potential. (7) Osman Durrani is rather more circumspect, pointing out that the 'nausea that repeatedly overcomes her at the very thought of her seducer makes it difficult for the reader to take an entirely positive view of the incident'. (8) Nevertheless, he concludes that hers is a path towards utopia, even if that necessarily involves traversing apocalypse. In his recent monograph Lonker convincingly argues that the story points to a sense of self that has little to do with individuation. Instead, being oneself means experiencing oneself in a state of being that is pre-individual, which for Claudine means giving in to the body's drive to dissolve individuality through an anonymous sexual act that has, indeed must have, nothing to do with individual desire. For the impersonal nature of the sex act serves merely to express 'die Bewegung eines vorindividuellen Lebenszusammenhangs' (Lonker, p. 62). Claudine's conviction that the betrayal of her husband is actually the 'Vollendung' of her love for him thus stems from her perception of a new form of identity that has no relation to the contingency of reality or individual consciousness. 'Damit wird [...] der Akt der Untreue zu einem Versuch, den Gehalt der Liebe vollstandig in den Bereich der Innerlichkeit zu uberf uhren' (ibid., p. 59). The foundation of love 'muss in einem Bereich angesiedelt sein, der von den Bedingungen der Wirklichkeit unabhangig ist' (ibid., p. 60). The loss of individuality becomes in Hans-Georg Pott's reading an almost mystical experience. He is unequivocal that Claudine attains a higher plane of subjectivity: 'Dies Bewusstsein, das von den Dingen der Welterfullt ist, [...] erfahrt seine letzte Steigerung in dem Abschied von diesen Fesseln und einem welt-, zeit- und raumlosen Zusichkommen.' (9) The story suggests a transcendence relating not only to the protagonist but also to the language:

Dieser alltagliche Seitensprung erstrahlt im Lichte einer Transzendenz, das dem verborgenen Ich selbst entstromt--der Gott in uns, der sich erniedrigenmuss, um sich zu erhohen. Darin liegt die Ubertretung und Uberwindung des Gesetzes, das die Liebe in der Ehe bestimmt [...]. Aber es handelt sich um mehr als Ubertretung, [...] sondern auch um die Uberwindung der Grenzen uberhaupt. Die Sprache selbst entzieht sich aller Konkretion. (Pott, p. 35)

There can be no doubt that Musil's interest in this story extends beyond sexuality and psychology to questions of language as such. Indeed, Gerhard Meisel suggests that Musil's text questions the very 'Konstitutionsbedingungen' of literature itself. (10) In 1966 Jurgen Schroder pragmatically demonstrated the ambiguity of the language by counting the words and phrases that undermine transparency. (11) As Durrani reports, Schroder identifies 'a grand total of 1,667 linguistic devices whose main function is to obscure rather than to reveal, or, as Schroder observes with obvious satisfaction, there is one doubt-creating syntactical element to every line of text. His conclusion is that Musil is here pushing language to its utmost limit, with a view to establishing its "frontiers"' (Durrani, p. 15). The notion of such definite 'unuberschreitbare[] Grenzen' (Schroder, p. 333) of language's expressivity is not entertained by later commentators. Kathleen O'Connor writes of the Vereinigungen that '[Musil's] doubts about the capacity of language led him to expand, rather than deny, its communicative force', (12) whereas Stefan Hajduk locates the problem of meaning not at a...

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