This book undertakes a comparative reassessment of psychosexual concerns in the works of Georg Trakl and Robert Musil. The two authors, so different in other respects, are shown to converge in their coordinated treatment of the problematics of sense and sensuality. In either case a narcissistic ideal of androgynous union with the sister as 'Doppelgänger im anderen Geschlecht' is set up, only to be revoked by the compulsive return to incestuous violence and inner division. By disrupting the quest for poetic and discursive sense, sexual antagonism operates at once as the prime mover in the more general crisis of selfhood and as the prime stumbling-block for the pursuit of aesthetic ends in either oeuvre.
This book, originally published in paperback in 1990 under the ISBN 978-0-947623-33-3, was made Open Access in 2024 as part of the MHRA Revivals programme.
Contents:
i-viii, 1-199
Sexuality and the Sense of Self in the Works of Georg Trakl and Robert Musil Andrew Webber Complete volume as single PDF
At first sight Trakl and Musil are not an obvious pairing: the one generally regarded as the quintessential lyric poet, a creator of highly personal and hermetic poetic landscapes, the other best known for his epic depiction of a society's death-throes. There is no evidence that the two ever encountered one another, or indeed read each other's work. But, as Webber shows, they do indeed meet in a common, central thematic preoccupation: their treatment of sexuality. The parallels are remarkable: in both writers there is a pursuit of a narcissistic ideal figured as a unio mystica with the sister; and in either case the ideal of androgynous union is beset by collapse into its antithesis, in the motif of the 'Lustmord'. This sexual conflict is fundamental to more general problematics of selfhood in both authors.
The construal of sense in the act of reading can be said to depend upon the two scales according to which any narrative is coordinated: continuity (that is, a sense of development through time) and contiguity (that is, a sense of relative disposition in space). In Trakl's mäture work these two scales are radically subverted, rendering the coordination of the reader's progress through the text intensely problematic. The shifts in tense and location, the peripeteia, lacunae and equivocation, which characterise his mature poetic discourse, are bound to militate constantly against the conventional expectations of a poem's sense of direction; thereby threatening any notion of a community of sense between poet and reader within the text. Furthermore the poetry resists the conventions of identity in the figures which move within it, and of the symbol as a reliable touchstone in the interpretation of poetic figures. The overriding impression is one of dislocation, of a poetic world progressively defamiliarised, on occasion to the point of senselessness.
The progressive derangement of the poetic landscape that is prefigured in the metatextual configurations, can also be traced in the development of the mirror which so often functions as the screen for their appearance. The mirror, by virtue of its associations with the myth of Narcissus, coordinates the three types of desire with which this study is concerned. It provides a space at once for sexual encounter, for "reflection' on the self, and for textual figures. Sexual desire, the desire for an integral sense of self, and the desire for poetic authenticity are all at stake when the mirror is under threat. All three locate their ideal, narcissistic object within the transfigured space through the looking-glass. This chapter charts the resolution of the mirror as figurative device, out of a role of poetic transfiguration into one of radical disfigurement.
This chapter focuses on Trakl's three extant dramatic torsos, all of which represent variations on the theme of the 'Lustmord', the traumatic scene of sexual violence which is the common denominator of Trakl's mythopoeic constructions, the common experience of his personal repertory of mythical figures. The perverse carnage of these grotesque 'blood-weddings' probably accounts for their critical neglect. However, Trakl scholarship remains partial as long as it circumvents the less palatable reaches of the oeuvre. These should be seen not simply as some aberrant aesthetic transgression, but as symptomatic of a tension, which obtains throughout the corpus, between lyrical form and the deforming forces of aggression and decay.
This section will pursue the dismantling of the narcissistic ideal, by focusing on the motif of androgynous union and in particular on what Richard Detsch calls the 'numinous' figure of the sister. In his chapter on 'Androgynous Man' Detsch is able to cast the motif in a ráther rosy light (without doubting the generally 'optimistic connotation' of the colour) by detaching his examples from their contexts, and taking them very much at face value. There is no regard here for the sort of subversion of the textual programme that the present study has sought to illustrate. While he is undoubtedly right in recognising the compound nature of the moment of transcendence in 'Abendländisches Lied' the unity of creation in 'Ein Geschlecht' as contingent upon the union of male and female 'Geschlechter' - he fails to see that it is but a moment.
By focusing my own reading firmly on the text, and, by extension, on the intertextual resonances between Musil's novel Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß and early writings of Freud, and to some extent Weininger's Geschlecht und Charakter, I set out not merely to question Reniers's unequivocal denial of the possibility of Freudian influence in the novel, which has since held sway in the secondary literature, but more importantly to show that, whatever its derivation, the sexual problematic has an essential role to play within the general aesthetic and ontological framework of Törleß.
We have seen that the cooperative crises of sense and sensuality in Törleß turn on a fantasied scenario where the subject enters into the female space of the 'Versteck', there to gaze upon the phallic object, the scenario being recurrently forestalled by the intervention of a series of 'Vorwände'. In the two novellas published together as the Vereinigungen this scenario is developed from the point of view of a female protagonist. Once more the psychosexual quest for identity is transposed into the metaphorical space of a house, encountering walls and doorways.
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Chapter VIII: Sexual Doubles in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften Andrew Webber doi:10.59860/td.c2708c3
This chapter shows how the motifs of the double, the veil, the 'Vorwand' and so on, which play such a focal role in the sexual problematics of Musil's early prose works, are equally significant in the very different economy of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften. The reading of this text concentrates on a small number of key passages, all concerned with scenes of sexual engagement of one kind or another, where the motifs in question are all at work. The function of these perverse preoccupations is in accordance with Musil's insistence (in 'Das Unanständige und Kranke in der Kunst') that the deviant, pathological or salacious can provide a unique perspective on experience in general, in so far as the writer of fiction is able to draw relations between the two.
The passages treated here all attest to the subversion of the hermaphroditic ideal, its recurrent collapse into the 'unnatürlichen Polaritätsspannung' of sexual difference, and the repertory of variations on the 'Lustmord' scenario. Within the more discursive framework of Der Mann one Eigenschaften, the meshing of sexuality and problems of meaning, traced in Törleß's crisis, and in the figure of the 'Vorwand' as disrupting intercourse in Die Vollendung, is taken a step further. The problem of sexual difference provides a paradigm at once for the invasion of difference into the sense of self (dramatised in encounters with the double) and for the denial of a simple signifying integrity in language. In as far as the self constructs its identity vis-à-vis the world through the mediation of language, the inherent difference between the signs deployed by language and the objects they purport to represent must interfere with the quest for identity.
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Bibliography entry:
Webber, Andrew, Sexuality and the Sense of Self in the Works of Georg Trakl and Robert Musil, MHRA Texts and Dissertations, 30 (MHRA, 1990)
First footnote reference:35 Andrew Webber, Sexuality and the Sense of Self in the Works of Georg Trakl and Robert Musil, MHRA Texts and Dissertations, 30 (MHRA, 1990), p. 21.
This title was first published by Modern Humanities Research Association for the Institute of Germanic Studies but rights to it are now held by Modern Humanities Research Association and the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies.
