Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities. Enabling limits are essential to creativity, without question, but are no less crucial to happiness. While imagining Christian Bök in a straightjacket, I suddenly recalled an image: Benjamin Braddock and Elaine Robinson at the end of The Graduate, escapees from religion and family and tradition and their personal pasts, ostensibly triumphant, together, liberated, putative graduates abandoning childish things. And their reward is anxiety, an absence of things to say, a shuffling of postures and gazes, fear: the back-of-the-bus welcome to a wide world which “spread[s] outward without a center.”

Robert Musil in The Man Without Qualities.

David Foster Wallace in The Pale King, which I’ve not read; this is from the “Good People” excerpt and was quoted by The Heavily Abridged Life & Times. The final line is quite good, better than many pyrotechnical turns of Wallace’s invention that will endure and define his style: the combination of vernacular rhythms with formal or even pedantic diction, for example, or the peppering of “which” into sentences, or the whole “brief interpolation” tic.

I believe Wallace’s fixation on the psychological spaces within lives of tedium, on the possibilities of beauty, freedom, heroism within the most ordinary lives imaginable, places him in the same literary milieu as Robert Musil, who also displayed ludicrous, encyclopedic polymathy in his pursuit of lost individual worlds: they were writers of the gaps, looking for agency and selfhood in the spaces left by triumphantly expansive bureaucracies of culture, politics, sciences, economics.

In his excellent Testaments Betrayed, Milan Kundera argues that the European novel (which includes most of the American tradition) has taken one approach to this task, while outside of Europe another has been pursued:

The tendency of the novel in the last stages of its modernism: in Europe, the ordinary pursued to its utomost; sophisticated analysis of gray on gray; outside Europe: accumulation of the most extraordinary coincidences; colors on colors. The dangers: in Europe, tedium of gray; outside Europe, monotony of the picturesque.

In many of his stories, Wallace seems determined to use elements of the magical realist traditions to leaven, as it were, the “tedium of gray”; in “Mister Squishy”, from Oblivion, for example, unresolved, bizarre, side-stories contrast with a study of gray on gray, and the people trapped within all those layers of gray, between lifeless layers of accumulated bureaucratic detritus, the sediment of dead sentiments, the quantification of all desire and fear, par excellence.

Aside from literally magical or highly dramatic plots, Wallace sometimes relies on metaphorical flights to give affective depth to the crises of inaction, stagnation, and boredom which are hard to capture in their awesome profundity given their very nature: too dull to make meaningful, they remain the most meaningful themes of our lives.

The metaphor above is not unlike one Kafka might have used, but Kafka would have been as likely to write a parable-like short piece about the armies themselves as to place them within a larger narrative.

In any event, it is above all true: so often in your life, you are thusly torn, and you feel the heated shame of knowing that you’re “Two hearted, a hypocrite to yourself either way.” There is a dramatic range of feelings, fears, possibilities within the depreciated spaces left to the individual, though one must assume that even they will soon be conquered, taken over by expanding technologies and the markets they make of our private worlds.

Robert Musil in The Man Without Qualities, quoted by American Roulette.

Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities; see also WG Sebald on traffic.

I live between two intersections which -by the reasoned reckoning of a machine or a bureaucrat- have been deemed sufficiently busy to merit traffic lights; humbler intersections, with their four-way-stops or through-traffic which, we are warned, “DOES NOT STOP,” must look on them with envy. On one end of my block, 9th street carries into the city traffic from the freeway; on 10th street, cars race to make the last light before climbing onto the same freeway to escape to places north, south, and east. It is as though from my window I can see the vena cava and aorta of the city’s heart.

And along my street stopping-and-starting cars carry their owners wheresoever they command, except left between 4 PM and 6 PM or to the curb Tuesdays overnight, when streetcleaners rearrange the dirt. The cars bunch at the first light, waiting irritably for the damnable nuisance of other cars precisely like them; when the light changes, the engines growl with pent-fury and they break free finally to fly, often just to stop again at the next light, brakes squealing. Sometimes, a truly monstrous truck barrels through and even with the windows closed we can hear it faintly. Twice we’ve seen an accident: the anxious passengers stand with arms crossed awaiting the police, none injured; they wonder how this will complicate their already scarcely-manageable lives as they stare at the light, etc.

Musil was a modernist; though he satirizes the subordination of the fragile human to the violence of the automobile, perhaps even he did not realize that within decades the walk of a city would be scarcely perceptible amidst much-less unique pace of its traffic, the same across states, countries, continents. On the other hand: in just moments one can distinguish the song of Asian roads from that of European roads or American Roads, and indeed in broad regions engine sizes, proportion of motorbikes, pitch and fluctuation of caterwauling sirens, the tongue of crosswalks that talk, and the regularity of acceleration and deceleration -in which one hears obedience to lights and signs- persist in distinguishing our little urban worlds from one another.

Matthew B. Crawford in Shop Class as Soulcraft, quoted by Jace Cooke. While this might better be expressed in more universal terms -women are at least as familiar with the “quiet and easy” satisfaction of material, creative labors as men are- it is nevertheless worth noting as we’re all transformed into “knowledge workers,” dissociated from anything concrete, employed in enterprises of complex symbolic processes, abstract profits, conjured instruments, closed ecosystems of meanings which seem never to yield something one might submit to “the infallible judgment of reality.”

As Robert Musil might say, pseudoreality prevails. I think it would be very hard to tell what a typical middle-manager’s contributions to the world have been, even enough for him to feel pride beyond what social standing confers, and such pride may fall away at any moment. Occasionally, one wishes one made something.

Robert Musil, Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, quoted by American Roulette and juxtaposed with Marcel Proust in a nice post titled The Perplexity of Character.

Musil’s wry suggestion that “…our entire history must appear to the sensitized eye as nothing but a corral, within the confines of which the human hoard stampedes senselessly back and forth” seems as much as anything the basis for his novel The Man Without Qualities, which features quite a lot of such stampeding. It also reminded me of a note in Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder, which A. lent to me and Abby recently:

In his book Art & Discontent: Theory at the Millennium, the art critic Thomas McEvilley develops the notion of the periodic recurrence of the postmodern, or rather the theory that modernist and postmodernist tendencies have actually been following one upon the other throughout history. In this context, for example, he uncovers a striking set of affinities between our own postmodernist ethos and that of the Alexandrian / Hellenistic age.

“Modernist” and “postmodernist” here mean temperaments, attitudes, cultural inclinations, not manifesto-laden creeds with specific content. Indeed, that’s the point: content -ideological, political, historical- is incidental, ephemeral, the stampeding of a species within a coral, a scattering powder outside of its container; form, the dynamics and relations and archetypes that map human experience, is largely unchanging. History is cyclical, not linear.

What we care about is content: dust filling vessels the form of which give shape to our existence. What we ignore is that shape, because without content it seems empty. But the profound exhaustion one sometimes experiences when reviewing some insipid iteration of culture -a new celebrity, a new serial killer, a new movement, a new war, the same as all the others- is a clue: everything is happening again and again and again, endlessly. Nothing is more illusory than novelty.

Robert Musil in The Man Without Qualities, quoted by American Roulette.

Robert Musil, “Grigia,” in Five Women, brought to mind by Meaghan. The idea of love being frangible, something gradually dissolved, has stayed with me; I find it frightening. It is easy enough to guard against the sudden, punctuated moment, the dramatic episode; against this geologic disintegration we must be more vulnerable.

Milan Kundera, The Curtain. Almost all discussions about the aesthetic values must address this problem: are judgments about art subjective or not? It is common enough in our time to consider everything subjective, but this is not so: indeed, it is the supposition of objective aesthetic values that permits art to have historical continuity in the first place, despite being the work of many thousands or millions of individuals:

…in the absence of [presupposed objective] aesthetic value, the history of art is just an enormous storehouse of works whose chronologic sequence carries no meaning.

This is clearly not the case, as anyone who knows the full catalog of a band or the arc of a painter’s career will attest; it is even truer when one looks at movements and counter-movements. The history of the arts is comparable to a conversation with consequential threads, and like a conversation this history presupposes certain values; what the content of those values is, whether they are to be celebrated or violated, traced or transgressed, is another matter.

But what is striking about Kundera’s passage, to me, is that he refrains from acting as a philosopher: he does not argue that aesthetic judgments are subjective or objective, but rather than they are in a zone between those categories: each one is a personal wager which aspires to objectivity.

Although most debates about art and aesthetics quickly become debates about the implicit morality, politics, or personality-associations of the debaters, those that don’t still may come to dead ends: someone will say, “Well, it is only your opinion,” or someone else will say, “It’s all just taste.”

And it at once is and isn’t. We may all have our happenstance proclivities, but these are irrelevant except to us. What makes an aesthetic judgment defensible is the degree to which its aspirational objectivity is supported by context, by historical observation, by comparison and contrasting, by references to the internal coherence, logic, structure, and intention of the art in question (I apologize to anyone who strictly supports the notion that there is an ‘intentional fallacy’).

Such qualities buttress an aesthetic judgment, but while it may asymptotically approach objectivity it will never achieve it, not even in the cases of the greatest artists: when Nabakov hates Dostoevsky and Musil finds Kafka dull, you know that understood objectivity is a myth (and those were all roughly contemporary European men!).

Witold Gombrowicz said that any artist is an anti-scientist, and Kundera’s unscientific assertion that aesthetic judgments are personal but not merely subjective, individual gambles communing with the objective, is an excellent example of why I prefer this mode of thought.